Scholar

What is the origin of Xi Jinping’s strongman rule? A “victorious Xi” thesis argues that Xi simply won his fight to gain power. But this raises the question of where Xi found the political support to do so. A “collective support” thesis suggests that…

Geopolitics has become marginalized in modern international relations scholarship despite its foundational role. This essay seeks to bring geopolitics back to the mainstream of international relations through conceptual, historical, and theoretical analyses. I…

Contemporary civil wars frequently involve numerous armed groups. How do armed groups compete with rival organizations for popular support? Existing research posits that militant organizations operating in the same conflict will often compete for support by…

For over 30 years, policymakers and scholars have taken for granted that Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait simply to seize its oil. That narrative misleadingly suggests that the Iraqi invasion happened to coincide with, but was unrelated to, the dawn of the…

The article analyses a process of escalation management over time between nuclear states under conditions of radical uncertainty. After Russia invaded Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin manipulated uncertainty to manage escalation and to deter NATO support of…

Twenty years after the Iraq War began, scholarship on its causes can be usefully divided into the security school and the hegemony school. Security school scholars argue that the main reason the Bush administration decided to invade Iraq was to safeguard the…

Rationalist understandings of military alliances argue that a formal treaty underpinning the security relationship is crucial for deepening and rendering more efficient defense cooperation between countries. However, Sweden’s and Finland’s cooperation with…

Four recent books offer compelling political and strategic explanations for why states pursue expansive nuclear and foreign policies. They provide new insights on an enduring question: What are the implications of nuclear weapons for international competition…

In the face of what could be a decades-long competition, the United States and China must consider how they will finance defense spending. Leaders in both states are constrained by an intertemporal dilemma: pay the high political cost of raising taxes today,…

For the past four decades, the U.S. Army has made repeated attempts to create an enduring doctrinal framework that describes the role of information in conflict, yet these attempts have been largely unsuccessful. What accounts for this struggle? More broadly,…

Scholars often relate how the public views drone strikes to one of three moral norms: soldiers’ battlefield courage, the protection of soldiers, or preventing civilian casualties. But what explains variation in the public’s perceptions of what constitutes…

Failures of costly state-building missions in places like South Vietnam and Afghanistan have created a widespread belief that foreign interventions cannot stabilize fragile states. However, a review of the operational principles of British colonialism may…