William Lippert, PhD, is a Senior Fellow with the Peace & Security Section. He received his doctorate in international security from Leiden University in the Netherlands in 2025. His dissertation and continued research focuses on adversarial conventional arms control (CAC) in Europe, including its long-term feasibility, historical context, and impact on peace and security. This includes assessing CAC agreements between NATO and Russia, and anticipating how any future agreements might be made and what form they may assume. Previously, William worked for INTERPOL as a criminal intelligence analyst with a focus on organized crime and terrorism, crime analysis training, and analytical methodologies and worked in INTERPOL’s headquarters offices in Lyon, France, and Singapore.
William’s research in arms control focuses on conventional arms control in Europe, but also includes universal/humanitarian arms control, nuclear arms control, and emerging military technologies. His research is based on an empirical study of CAC agreements from 1918-2025, applying comparative case study and process tracing methodologies amongst others to understand the fundamental origins of CAC agreements and to predict how future CAC agreements might look and how successfully they might be. He has extensively published on CAC in Europe. More broadly, William has extensive knowledge of military affairs and armed conflict, to include both large-scale conventional wars and the global war on terrorism (GWOT), on which he worked extensively as an INTERPOL analyst. William’s work at INTERPOL included drafting intelligence analytical reports, delivering training in crime analysis to police experts, developing and maintaining crime databases, and representing the organization at working group meetings around the world. Prior to INTERPOL, William was an intelligence and strategy analyst for the US Department of Defense in the Washington, DC area. William is a US, Irish, and Vietnamese national.