Research

My research interests include international relations theory, security, and U.S. foreign policy. I am particularly interested in historical and empirical questions on national and international security topics (wartime violence, causes of war) with ethical and policy implications for today’s world. I focus primarily on explanations based on beliefs and shared ideas, and the extent to which they compete with and complement materialist accounts.

First Book Project: American Torture from the Philippines to Iraq: A Recurring Nightmare

Oxford University Press, 2022. Available here: https://academic.oup.com/book/38998

Why has the United States turned to torture in small wars over the last hundred-plus years? Torture, after all, is morally bankrupt, risky, and rarely effective as an interrogation method. I argue that the anti-torture norm has two features that can lead to torture. First, because it is difficult to separate torture from less harsh acts, the norm lacks specificity. This allows practitioners to portray their behavior as something short of torture, and redefine torture as something that excludes their behavior. Second, the anti-torture norm can, paradoxically, encourage torture by attracting those who believe unscrupulous methods confer advantages on those who use them. Drawing on archival and leaked documents, I test these explanations by pulling out common strands across three different foreign policy settings in American history: the Philippine-American War (1899-1902), the CIA from its founding to the Vietnam War, and the post-2001 war on terror.

My manuscript makes theoretical, empirical, and policy-relevant contributions. By tackling the “hard cases” of non-compliance, my argument adds to the constructivist literature of international relations theory by demonstrating that norms can have precisely the opposite of their usual effect, implying that the scope of normative impact may be much wider than previously believed. It improves on current theoretical explanations of torture that point rightly to racism and revenge as motivators, but miss the consistent connection between intelligence needs and coercive interrogation. It also amends rational choice accounts by explaining why people believe that torture works. Empirically, I bring to light previously overlooked archival data showing that torture during the war on terror – and the justifications and beliefs that supported it – was not just a one-off event in American history, but part of a recurring pattern. Finally, my argument implies that policymakers must target the “gray zones” of coercive interrogation to avoid backsliding on human rights commitments.

I also demonstrate how my theory can be extended to phenomena beyond torture. For instance, I show that the pervasive belief that autocrats have an edge versus rule-bound democracies has tempted certain elected officials to chip away at their own liberal-democratic institutions.

Second Book Project: Fatal Fatalism: Major War as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

The dangers of uncertainty under anarchy have a privileged place in the canonical works on the causes of major war. I argue that starting a large war often follows not from uncertainty, but from a conviction – a near-certainty – that war cannot be avoided. As I demonstrate using primary and secondary sources, belief in the inevitability of war played a crucial role in the lead-up to both world wars. It is likely to be a key ingredient in any future nuclear exchange as well. The argument provides some confirmation that power politics and war can become self-fulfilling prophecies, as social constructivists have long held. It also implies that nuclear security scholars and the U.S. military are far too focused on making sure that nuclear deterrence is credible, and insufficiently worried that demonstrating credibility will create a dangerous sense of fatalism that can lead to war.

I have presented preliminary work on this project at two APSA annual conferences, an MPSA annual conference, the New Realism conference through Ohio State University, and Bates College.

Peer-reviewed Publications:

“Norms, Perverse Effects, and Torture.” International Theory 7, no. 1 (2015): 33-60.

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