Cecelia Lynch is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies, University of California, Irvine. She is an expert on international relations, religion and ethics, social movements and civil society and has researched and published extensively on topics related to peace, security, international organization, globalization, humanitarianism, and religion. Professor Lynch won the 1999 Furniss Award, which is given by Mershon Center for International Security to an author whose first book makes an exceptional contribution to the study of national and international security, and was co-winner of 1998-99 Myrna Bernath Award from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, both for Beyond Appeasement: Interpreting Interwar Peace Movements in World Politics (Cornell University Press). Her other books include Law and Moral Action in World Politics (co-edited with Michael Loriaux, University of Minnesota Press, 2000), and Strategies for Research in Constructivist International Relations (with Audie Klotz, M.E. Sharpe, 2007), which is currently being translated into Korean. She has been awarded fellowships from the Social Science Research Council and MacArthur Foundation, and is completing a book on tensions in Western (Christian) religious ethics on violence, funded also by the AAUW and Huntington Library. In 2006, she was awarded an Andrew W. Mellon New Directions Post-doctoral Fellowship for her current research on Islamic and interfaith religious ethics in world crises.

She also edits the blog, www.humanitarianismafrica.typepad.com. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University in New York City.