Dr William Lippert is an Affiliated Researcher (Research Fellow / Guest) at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, where he completed his PhD under the supervision of Professor Joachim Koops on 16 October 2025. His research focuses on adversarial conventional arms control (CAC) in Europe—its long-term feasibility, historical trajectory, and impact on peace and security—with particular attention to agreements between NATO and Russia and to the conditions under which any future arrangements might be negotiated; and other forms of arms control, including strategic nuclear arms control and non-proliferation.

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Dr William Lippert is an Affiliated Researcher (Research Fellow / Guest) at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, where he completed his PhD under the supervision of Professor Joachim Koops on 16 October 2025. His research focuses on adversarial conventional arms control (CAC) in Europe—its long-term feasibility, historical trajectory, and impact on peace and security—with particular attention to agreements between NATO and Russia and to the conditions under which any future arrangements might be negotiated; and other forms of arms control, including strategic nuclear arms control and non-proliferation.

His doctoral work, Delegation to Treaty Bodies and International Organisations for Conventional Arms Control Agreements in Europe, examines how states delegate authority to international institutions for the verification and management of CAC regimes. Recent work includes 'Infrequent but Serious: Severe Conventional Arms Control Agreement Violations' (Defence and Security Analysis, 2025), drawing on a dataset of forty CAC agreement cases in Europe since the end of the First World War; the article finds that extreme malicious violations are rare but disproportionately consequential, with seven of eight such cases contributing to the outbreak of war. He continues to publish on arms control, autonomous weapon systems, and adjacent dimensions of European security, and engages public and policy audiences on the place of arms control in contemporary deterrence and crisis-stability debates.

Lippert came to academic research after twenty-five years as an intelligence analyst. From 2002 to 2021 he was a Criminal Intelligence Analyst at INTERPOL, working at the organisation's headquarters in Lyon and in Singapore on organised crime and terrorism, crime-analysis training, and analytical methodologies. Before INTERPOL he served as an intelligence analyst at the US Defense Intelligence Agency, and as a research analyst on the US Commission on National Security (the Hart-Rudman Commission). He holds a BA in International Studies and Psychology from American University in Washington, DC, and an MA in Security Studies from Georgetown University.

He is also a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Global Governance Institute (GGI) in Brussels, where he works on arms control and autonomous weapon systems, and serves on the Advisory Board of the Protective Intelligence Network.

Publications