Welcome!

My name is Max Plithides. I am currently a Harry Bloomfield and Challenges of Democracy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Tel Aviv University, where I work under the sponsorship of Professor Azar Gat. In 2026–27, I will join the Vanderbilt Institute of National Security as a Postdoctoral Fellow, before returning to Tel Aviv University as an Azrieli International Postdoctoral Fellow from 2027 to 2030. I received my PhD in Political Science from UCLA and was a Predoctoral Fellow at the Institute on Global Conflict & Cooperation at UC San Diego from 2024 to 2025.

My research lies at the intersection of international security, political economy, and war studies. My book project, A Political Economy of War, develops a new formal framework that reconceptualizes warfighting as a process of production. Just as economies combine land, labor, and capital to produce goods and services, military power is generated through combinations of personnel and equipment. I argue that states structure their militaries around their underlying economic strengths and pursue wartime strategies that reflect their relative factor endowments.

My work has been published in Research & Politics and International Interactions. I have also served as an Editorial Assistant at International Studies Quarterly and currently have a manuscript under revise-and-resubmit at Political Psychology. In addition, I have contributed policy commentary to foreign policy outlets including The Diplomat and Global Politics at a Glance.