Dr. Tobias Greiff

Dr. Tobias ‘Tobi’ Greiff is an international conflict analyst serving as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the College of Professional Studies. In this role he oversees the planning, administration, and delivery of academic programs for the college, with the goal to ensure an outstanding teaching experience for our faculty and a transformative learning experience for our students. He further provides leadership to four main areas of activity for the college including Student Affairs, Faculty Affairs, Instructional Design and Center Operations.

Before joining CPS, Dr. Greiff served as Senior Assistant Dean for Academic Programs at the Elliott School of International Affairs (GW). In this capacity he oversaw all aspects of academic programs, including budgets, curricula, course schedules, and part-time faculty. He was in charge of the school's online strategy, led the school's international partnership development (graduate exchange partnerships), oversaw the Global Capstone Program (graduate) and the Dean's Scholars Program (undergraduate honors program), and coordinated curriculum development and assessment for all of ESIA’s 19 undergraduate and graduate degree programs. He further provided leadership in all regards of academic assessment, compliance with accreditor and university quality standards, and institutional research for the school.

His research is focused on the emergence of new violent actors in post-war settings, the political use of cultural matrixes (symbols, discourses, rituals) to mobilize, legitimize and justify violence, and intergroup positioning processes that challenge local moral orders and pose threats to the security and stability of nation states. His current research is centered on the emergence of political agency and power in the immediate aftermath of large-scale intergroup conflicts and how the distribution and negotiation processes of power influence the stability of peace settlements (mainly in Bosnia and Herzegovina). Here he is in particular interested in how the interaction of various political actors, whose legitimacy (e.g. voter support) continues to be dependent on war-time – mainly ethno-national – loyalties, can create a new peacetime working order. His research has been published in two monographs and several articles and book chapters.

He teaches conflict resolution in the Security Policy Studies Program at the Elliott School of International Affairs and holds affiliations with the Institute for European, Eurasian and Russian Studies (IERES) and the Center for Narrative and Conflict Resolution (GMU). Previously he worked as a visiting researcher at the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, the Department of Government at Georgetown University, the Department for International Relations and International Organizations at the University of Groningen, and the Balkan Institute for Conflict Resolution, Responsibility, and Reconciliation at the Sarajevo School of Science and Technology.