The study of history and our shifting perceptions of the past is my lifelong passion. I originally wanted to be an archaeologist and my first true love was classical Greco-Roman and Chinese history. As a scholar of international relations, my work continues to be keenly aware of the underlying historical patterns of thought and behavior that structure the interstate system as well as the discipline of IR itself. Although broadly unified by this historical consciousness, my research interests are not confined by disciplinary boundaries. Rather, my primary interest is the study of power and conflict in all of its forms. Inexorably, this has channeled me in several directions.
First, I have a strong background in military history, especially theories of naval and air power, as well as issues surrounding military transformation and the future of war. I believe that this focus on the detailed evolution of conflict is important. Traditional IR debates over the cause of military conflict often overlook the simple fact that war itself is a dynamic international practice that has evolved across space and time, particularly so in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. How can we solve what John A. Vasquez (1993) famously termed the “war puzzle” if we do not have an up-to-date understanding of what war actually is?
But my research interests have also broadened to include ideational and discursive conflicts between as well as within states. These conflicts are interpenetrated with material assemblages, such as pipelines systems or monuments, and increasingly transnational in nature. My work on cosmopolitan memory, for example, has explored ways that perceptions of history--especially societal recollections of violent trauma embedded in memory apparatuses--are entangled with contemporary politics in East Asia. Similarly, my work on the politics surrounding unpiloted aircraft, highlighted how participants in technological controversies, such as engineers and military officers, strategically draw upon cultural databanks of national trauma as well as past glory in struggles to legitimize and delegitimize artifacts through utopian and dystopian discourses. This shaping, even when it occurs in the context of domestic power struggles, inevitably has geo-strategic consequences. My study of the rise of the Chinese navy drew upon the anti-hegemonic sea power theory of Alfred von Tirpitz as a heuristic tool to critically analyze the dynamics of contemporary US-China rivalry. Without absolving either side of responsibility for their part in the ongoing security dilemma, my research highlighted how the Mahanist tradition of sea power, essentially a type of hegemonic memory, was playing a programmatic role in shaping US force deployments.
The second direction that my work has taken is an ongoing engagement with the question of the future, which is grounded in the diverse literature of Science and Technology Studies (STS). During my postgraduate studies, I became acutely aware that the social sciences are under growing pressure to come to terms with systemic transformation, despite methodological and publishing constraints that discourage scholars from studying things that do not exist or are only emerging. Even quantitative methodologies, lionized for their predictive power, are grounded in historical data. But imagining the future of politics, the economy, and technology, which is carried out by international organizations, states, and corporations on a daily basis, is a key aspect of contemporary governance. Companies and militaries, for example, often do not have the luxury of waiting for change to become real before they start adapting to it. Therefore, much of my recent research is focused on exploring the dynamics whereby such speculations about the future are formulated, disseminated, and resisted. In my dissertation, I demonstrated an array of specific techniques whereby state and non-state actors generated futuristic imaginaries to shape the regulatory landscape for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the European Union and the United States. Myth-making about the future is an important attribute of political power in the modern world and constitutes a topic worthy of deeper investigation. The political and social implications of how we predict the future informs my current work on the debates over THAAD, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and ways to counteract fake news.