Colin Kahl is an assistant professor in the Security Studies Program in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, where he teaches courses on international relations, international security, American foreign policy, civil and ethnic conflict, terrorism, and the war in Iraq.

His current research focuses on U.S. compliance with the Law of War in Iraq. He has published articles on U.S. policy and military conduct in Iraq in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and International Security, and he is completing a book manuscript entitled The Culture of Calamity: Norms, the U.S. Military, and the War in Iraq. His previous research analyzed the causes and consequences of violent civil and ethnic conflict in developing countries, focusing particular attention on the demographic and natural resource dimensions of these conflicts. His book on the subject, States, Scarcity, and Civil Strife in the Developing World, was published by Princeton University Press in 2006, and related articles and chapters have appeared in International Security, the Journal of International Affairs, and various edited volumes. He is a regular consultant for the Department of
Defense on stability operations, counterinsurgency, and strategy, and he has been a consultant for the U.S. Government's Political Instability Task Force (formerly the State Failure Task Force) since 1999. From January 2005 to August 2006, he was a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow in the office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Stability Operations where he worked on issues related to counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and responses to failed states, and conducted research on U.S. operations in Iraq, including a summer 2006 "lessons learned" study in Baghdad. From 1997 to 1998 Kahl was a National Security Fellow at the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University.