Lindsey A. O’Rourke is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Quincy Institute and Assistant Professor of Political Science at Boston College. Her research focuses on international security, United States foreign policy, and military interventions. She has special expertise in foreign-imposed regime change and covert action.

She is the author of Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War (2018), which analyzes the causes, conduct, and effectiveness of covert regime change attempts. Building upon extensive archival research, O’Rourke shows that the United States attempted to covertly replace a foreign government more than 60 times during the Cold War but that the vast majority of these operations did not achieve their foreign policy goals. The book received the 2020 Best Book Award from the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) of the International Studies Association and an Honorable Mention for the 2019 Best Book from a Non-Tenured Faculty Member Award from the International Security and Arms Control Section of the American Political Science Association. Related research of foreign-imposed regime change has appeared in International Security, Security Studies, and other venues.

Prior to Boston College, O’Rourke was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College and a pre-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies at George Washington University. She received her PhD in Political Science and an MA in International Relations from the University of Chicago.