[1][2] Strauss received a BA in English from Dartmouth College and a PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley.
He was previously a freelance journalist based in Africa,[5] and in 2000 was a visiting fellow at Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris.
[4] He is the 2018 winner of the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas for Improving World Order for his book Making and Unmaking Nations: War, Leadership, and Genocide in Modern Africa.
[8] He also translated The Great Lakes of Africa: Two Thousand Years of History by the French historian Jean-Pierre Chrétien into English (MIT Press/Zone Books, 2003).
[4][9] He has also co-edited Remaking Rwanda, State Building and Human Rights after Mass Violence with Lars Waldorf.