Research

Modern states are often described as using a wide range of creative labels for conflict. Conventional wisdom views this as a largely modern phenomenon, as older norms of formally declaring war eroded with 20^th century changes to international law. However, contemporary accounts overstate the extent to which wars were clearly and formally declared in past centuries. There are many puzzling cases of early 19^th century undeclared wars, and I argue that the reasons why many older conflicts were undeclared are remarkably similar to why wars are undeclared today. This paper reframes formally declared wars as part of a broader practice of legal labeling states use to manage conflict escalation, with a “state of war” at the top of a legal ladder of escalation and several “measures short of war” beneath it. States choose labels to signal to international and domestic audiences an intention to escalate or limit the conflict. To assess this theory, I examine early 19^th century conflicts, comparing the United States’ undeclared war with France from 1798-1801 with the formally declared War of 1812 with Great Britain. I draw on archival documents to assess key officials’ label selection in each case. The paper then extends the theory to re-consider modern conflicts, including the Falklands War in 1982, to find similar rationales at play and cast fresh light on why declared states of war are often described to be in decline today. This paper offers theoretical contributions to literature on escalation management, international law, and rhetoric in international relations.  

Formally declared states of war are often considered extinct, either due to the increasing adoption of international humanitarian law or the UN Charter in 1945. However, several deviant cases of states declaring “legal states of war” persist post-1945. These cases, usually involving minor powers, include several peculiar cases that fall outside of the material conception of war, being formally declared but not fought. To examine these “paper wars,” this paper draws on older conceptions of war dating back to Hugo Grotius that include war’s legal dimension as a “status,” a formally designated time separating war from peace. By interacting wars’ material and legal dimensions, I develop a typology of conflict types that sheds light on these “paper wars” and offers a new theory for why states use war formalities in international law. Rather than showing how international law restrains or legitimates, this theory shows how international law is used to empower states through manipulation of belligerent rights of war, with widespread economic consequences for third-party states and non-state actors. This theory is empirically evaluated through a longitudinal study of the Arab-Israel Wars from 1948 to 1979. Drawing on original archival research, this paper looks at Egypt’s decision to persistently claim a legal state of war with Israel between major moments of conflict and its implications for Israeli-bound shipping in the Suez Canal. Egypt’s insistence on being legally at war is especially puzzling as it flew against prevailing norms and international law established by the UN Charter. Empirically, this paper sheds new light on the legal dimension of one of the most significant conflicts of the post-1945 period, while theoretically offering a reconsideration of the concept of war itself with implications for literatures in international law and wartime commercial policy.

Why do great powers choose to pursue covert interventions in their spheres of influence when there is little concern over large-scale escalation? This paper develops a theory for how a regional treaty of non-intervention incentivizes great powers to conceal their interventions to avoid regional repercussions. Drawing on the legalization and institutional design literature, the theory argues that regional legal commitments are likely to exert strong compliance pressure via rigid commitments and clear issue linkages, inadvertently incentivizing covert options. To demonstrate this impact of regional non-intervention treaties, the paper empirically examines cases of U.S. overt and covert intervention before and after the ratification of the principle of non-intervention in Latin America in 1933. First, this includes a medium-N survey of U.S. overt and covert interventions in Latin America over the 20^th century from 1898-1991. Second, process tracing is conducted using archival research on three case studies of U.S. intervention, specifically covert interventions in Guatemala in 1954 and Cuba in 1961, and overt intervention in the Dominican Republic in 1965. This paper builds on existing work on covert intervention and provides insight on the unique strength of regional, as opposed to universal, treaties governing the use of force.

What role do extra-governmental elites like think tanks play in democratic foreign policy, and how does their relationship with government officials enable or constrain national security debates? Drawing on Hall and Deardorff’s (2006) theory of lobbying as a legislative subsidy, we argue that think tanks and the broader marketplace of ideas operate by a similar logic: they primarily provide supportive information to allies rather than persuade opponents. We theorize two conditions shaping their involvement in consequential debates: (1) whether the policy narrative is settled or unsettled, and (2) alignment with the president’s preferred strategic ends and means. To evaluate this argument, we compile an original corpus of elite discourse on the Ukraine War from February 2022 through May 2025. The dataset includes all articles related to the Ukraine War in a prominent foreign affairs journal, think tank reports and commentary, and a corpus of New York Times and Wall Street Journal coverage. This approach enables us to trace how narrative situations evolve, how think tanks influence discourse, and how their contributions align with or contest government positions. The project advances research on national security politics, expertise, and democratic advantage in IR.

Why has the United States stopped declaring war? Full-scale wars through World War II were all formally declared by Congress, and yet every full-scale war thereafter has lacked a formal war declaration. Existing theories of a decline in war declarations worldwide explain this sudden change by pointing to either incentives to evade the laws of armed conflict, or due to the presence of the U.N. Charter after 1945. This paper argues, instead, that technological advances such as nuclear weapons made general war much less palatable, and limited war more attractive. Because formal war declarations were traditionally only intended for general war—conflict unlimited geographically and in the means employed— declarations of war simply became less applicable in the postwar era defined by limited conflict in the shadow of the bomb.