Research

My research investigates how states use law to classify war, violence, and conflict. Much as political scientists develop coding schemes to distinguish different types of interstate and intrastate wars, I show how states use formal legal mechanisms to classify violent conflict as it emerges, for example as an expansive “war” or a limited “operation,” a “non-international armed conflict” or “internal violence.” These labels are intensely political, carrying substantial legal, normative, and strategic stakes. I develop a theory to explain when states employ different legal labels, with a particular focus on when they are used strategically in ways that clearly do not match the facts on the ground. My work draws on original archival research to conduct in-depth historical process tracing and to generate data, across a wide historical scope from the 18th to the 21st century.

Dissertation (Book Project)

The Labeling Game: Classifying Conflicts in International Politics
Committee: Austin Carson (Chair), Paul Poast, Rochelle Terman. Expected defense: June 2027.

When is war “war”? States often deploy euphemistic labels for conflict, from “special military operation” to “police action” to “quarantine,” that plainly belie the material reality on the ground. Conversely, small law enforcement operations targeting drug trafficking have been escalated and labeled “non-international armed conflicts” against “terrorist organizations.” States not only avoid formally declared wars in major conflicts but also invoke legal states of war when little or no fighting is present. What explains variation in state use of legal labels, and why do states so often label armed conflicts in ways that appear inconsistent with the material reality on the ground?

My dissertation examines how states employ legal labels to formally classify conflict and the consequences that follow. Conventional accounts largely treat international law either as an external constraint measured by state compliance or as a rhetorical device that can legitimize action. Building on the latter approach, I look beyond how law strengthens justifications for force to how it is used to proclaim what kind of conflict is happening. Drawing on speech act theory, I treat legal labels as performative acts that states use to “do things” in the world, such as creating legal statuses, granting rights and duties, and defining relationships. Rather than simply constraining state behavior, law serves as a classifying tool that states proactively use to empower later action. I particularly focus on “mismatched labels” that do not align with the material reality on the ground, which come in two forms: over-labeling and under-labeling.

Drawing on limited war theory, I argue that legal labels for conflict exist in a hierarchical “legal ladder of escalation,” which runs parallel to traditional “material” escalation. When the desired levels of material and legal escalation diverge, mismatched labels are created. State choice of legal escalation is driven by the desired combination of a label’s direct and indirect effects. Direct effects trigger concrete legal rights and obligations and engage different bureaucratic machinery. Indirect effects are a label’s symbolic functions, or what it communicates to domestic and international audiences. When states seek to de-emphasize a conflict, they resort to under-labeling strategies, resulting in label stretching and legal inventions such as the 19th century’s “pacific blockade.” In contrast, when states seek to escalate, or to create a political situation with full legal powers where none presently exist, they are more likely to use over-labeling strategies, creating “paper wars” with extreme legal labels that far outstrip the facts on the ground.

Empirically, the project draws on original archival research to assess this framework on cases of interstate and intrastate war from the 18th to 20th centuries:

  • the United States’ undeclared Quasi-War with France (1798–1801), compared with the formally declared War of 1812;
  • World War II, with its wide variation in labeling practices, from the “Phony War” of 1939 to Latin American declarations of war against the Axis powers;
  • the Arab-Israel Wars (1948–1979), in which Egypt persistently claimed a legal state of war with Israel;
  • the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962), which France treated as an internal dispute and the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) contested as an interstate war.

This research draws on the U.S. and U.K. national archives and four presidential libraries, including declassified government documents, legal opinions, and diplomatic correspondence.

In the conclusion, I extend the framework to other domains with a clear hierarchy of legal labels, including human rights abuses up to genocide and sovereign default in international political economy. Overall, I show a novel way in which states use law strategically, as a classifying tool that can empower or restrain action.

My job market paper and related articles from the project appear below under Working Papers.

Publications

“History, Archaeology, and Espionage as Improvised Legibility” (with Austin Carson)
European Journal of International Relations 31, no. 4 (2025): 993–1019. Link

How do states develop the capacity to understand new geographic domains and issue areas? This article introduces a theory of “improvised legibility” to explain how states make sense of the new and unfamiliar, extending James Scott’s concept of legibility to clandestine intelligence collection on foreign areas. Improvised legibility occurs in two phases: first, improvised connections, involving ad hoc relationships with non-state experts, and second, improvised institutionalization, through experimental organizations fitted to the new domains. We illustrate the theory through British efforts to make the Middle East legible from the 1840s to World War I, from ad hoc relationships with archaeologists such as Gertrude Bell and T.E. Lawrence to the creation of the Arab Bureau.

Working Papers

“The Labeling Game: Classifying Conflicts in International Politics” (Job Market Paper)

Modern states are often described as using a wide range of creative labels for conflict, from “police actions” and “quarantines” to “special military operations.” Conventional wisdom views this as a largely modern phenomenon, as older norms of formally declaring war eroded with 20th century changes to international law. This paper questions this historical trendline. Declarations of war were uncommon well before 1945, and several states continued to claim legal states of war long after it. Drawing on speech act theory, I develop a general theory of legal labeling, which states use to classify conflict. I argue that these labels exist on a hierarchical legal ladder of escalation, based on their relative weight in producing direct legal effects and indirect symbolic effects, which gives states strong incentives to pursue mismatched labels. When a state’s intended legal and material escalation diverge, it pursues under-labeling or over-labeling strategies. I examine two cases that are puzzling for their time, the undeclared Quasi-War between the United States and France from 1798–1801 and Egypt’s claimed state of war with Israel after the 1949 armistice, drawing on American, British, and United Nations archival records.

Draft available on request (email).

“Paper Wars: Belligerent Rights and Lingering States of War After 1945”

Formally declared states of war are often considered extinct after 1945, yet several deviant cases persist, including “paper wars” that were formally declared but not fought. Building on older conceptions of war dating back to Hugo Grotius that treat war’s legal dimension as a “status” rather than a singular “act,” this paper interacts war’s material and legal dimensions to develop a typology of conflict. It shows how law empowers states through the manipulation of belligerent rights, with widespread economic consequences for third-party states and non-state actors. Drawing on original archival research, I trace Egypt’s decision to persistently claim a legal state of war with Israel from 1948 to 1979, even during periods largely free of fighting, and how Egypt used this status to seize Israeli-bound shipping in the Suez Canal.

Draft available on request (email).

“Classifying Conflicts: Legal Labels, Escalation, and the Puzzle of Early Undeclared Wars”

Conventional wisdom views declarations of war as a once-common practice that declined only after 1945, giving rise to the wide range of creative labels states now use for conflict. This article shows that contemporary accounts overstate the extent to which wars were formally declared in past centuries. Drawing on archival documents, I compare the United States’ undeclared Quasi-War with France (1798–1801) with the formally declared War of 1812 to show how states used labels to signal intentions to limit or escalate conflict, and how remarkably similar language reappears in recent conflicts such as the 1982 Falklands War.

Draft available on request (email).

“Legal but Lethal: The State of War in the Shadow of the Bomb” (with Patrick Hulme)

The distinction between war and peace is central to international relations, yet states have rarely recognized any legal “state of war” since World War II. Existing explanations attribute this decline to legalization, through either the outlawry of war or the codification of international humanitarian law. Instead, we argue that the decline was driven by changing material conditions of war. A legal “state of war” denoted a conflict of unlimited means, scale, and geographic scope, and nuclear weapons and the Cold War alliance blocs made major powers eager to avoid it for fear of triggering World War III. Leveraging archival evidence from the Korean War, Cuban Missile Crisis, and Vietnam War, we demonstrate that U.S. policymakers consistently chose legally suboptimal alternatives to a state of war to avoid escalation with the Soviet Union and China.

Draft available on request (email).

“Binding the Northern Colossus: The Curious Strength of Regional Treaties in U.S.-Latin American Relations”

Why do great powers choose covert interventions in their spheres of influence when there is little concern over large-scale escalation? This paper develops a theory of how a regional treaty of non-intervention incentivizes great powers to conceal their interventions to avoid regional repercussions. I argue that regional legal commitments exert strong compliance pressure via rigid commitments and clear issue linkages, inadvertently incentivizing covert options. The paper examines U.S. intervention before and after Latin America’s principle of non-intervention was ratified in 1933, drawing on a medium-N survey of U.S. interventions in the region from 1898 to 1991 and archival process tracing of covert intervention in Guatemala (1954) and overt intervention in the Dominican Republic (1965).

Draft available on request (email).

“‘A Gift, Not a Trade’: Think Tanks, Extra-Governmental Expertise, and the Elite Politics of National Security” (with Matthew Conklin)

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.

Works in Progress

“‘The Lady Doth Protest Too Much’: The Flexibility and Limits of Article 51 Self-Defense Justifications for the Use of Force”

The doctrine of self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter is often criticized for its near-infinite flexibility, as it is invoked to justify everything from targeted airstrikes to aggressive wars. This paper asks how effective claiming self-defense is as a legitimation strategy. I hypothesize that the more legal rationales a state includes in its letter, the more suspect the claim becomes, and that while geopolitical alignment strongly predicts states’ responses, it is insufficient in especially dubious cases. The paper draws on a dataset I am constructing that links the 433 self-defense letters states sent to the Security Council from 1945 to 2018, which I have extended to 2026 for the United States, to the Correlates of War, MID, and UCDP/PRIO conflict data. To measure reception, I compare the support and criticism states express in UN statements and votes, accounting for geopolitical alignment and for repeated letters about the same conflict.

“You Started It: The Lengths States Go to Claim Self-Defense”

This paper shows how states often go to great lengths to shape the material situation before a conflict so that the other side appears to be the aggressor and they can claim self-defense. I compare Germany’s diplomacy during the July Crisis of 1914, when Bethmann Hollweg worked to have Russia mobilize first, with the Soviet Union’s actions before the Winter War with Finland, and then extend the argument to Russia in the Donbas before 2022. Beyond these cases, the data will show how often opposing states each claimed self-defense at the outset of Correlates of War interstate wars.

“All in Self-Defense: The Long History of a Universal Justification for War”

This paper shows that the change in the law governing the use of force between 1928 and 1945 is far overstated. Self-defense is one of the oldest and most common forms of justification for war made in legal terms, dating back to ancient Rome. Even when other justifications are named, they are often still framed within a variation of self-defense. Combining war manifestos reaching back to 1492 with the Article 51 letters and the justifications recorded for wars since 1816, which span the 1945 divide, I trace the continuity of self-defense as a justification for the use of force.

“Who Calls It War? Diverging Labels for Conflict in Korea and Vietnam”

Who decides when an ongoing conflict becomes a war? While official accounts may hold to one label, a single conflict may carry several at once. During the Korean War, President Truman insisted that “we are not at war.” Yet within days of the invasion, newspapers were already writing of “the Korean war,” and courts later split over whether the conflict counted as a war for military pay, insurance contracts, and military justice. This paper examines how labels diverge across the executive, the military, the courts, the press, and soldiers on the ground, and how they shift over the course of a war. I theorize that this divergence is driven by the stakes each actor has in the label and by each actor’s distance from the fighting in time and space. Empirically, I trace these labels through the Korean and Vietnam Wars, drawing on official statements, military correspondence, court rulings, press coverage, and soldiers’ letters and memoirs.

“The Uniquely American Rise of the Non-intervention Principle”

Conventional wisdom in international relations views the strict principle of non-intervention as a core part of state sovereignty, deeply rooted in European history and classically traced to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. However, I draw on recent scholarship in intellectual and legal history to show that the most strict or absolute principle of non-intervention arose from the Western Hemisphere. Specifically, I show that an absolute principle of non-intervention grew out of a Latin American legal response to repeated U.S. interventions in Latin America. I trace this through several successive Pan-American and inter-American conferences in the early 20th century, through which this principle was finally enshrined in law in the Montevideo Convention of 1933 and the Additional Protocol Relative to Non-Intervention signed at Buenos Aires in 1936. This hardened view of sovereignty was then adopted more globally as a general principle of international law. Tracing this history, I develop a particularist theory of the origins of international law, in which general rules emerge from the circumstances of particular regions outside the traditionally understood epicenters of power and empire.

“Bureaucratic Classifications: Legibility of National Security” (Second book project)

The categories of national security are often taken for granted, yet the lines between them are rarely clear. When new areas such as space or cyber emerge, states must decide whether to treat them as a new domain of war, place them under a command, or build a separate armed service, as illustrated by the debates that culminated in the creation of the U.S. Space Force. Where these lines fall decides how the state organizes its resources. This project extends my work on legal labels to the broader classification systems used by national security bureaucracies, which act as institutionalized mental maps with long-lasting consequences. Once set up, they shape what officials see, which tools they reach for, and how resources flow, and they are built into organizational charts that funnel resources up and down the state. The project focuses on how national security bureaucracies divide up the world, by region and by function. Drawing on archival research, I trace how American and British bureaucracies developed their regional and functional offices over time and the consequences these had across a range of policy issues, including how new domains such as cyber and space came to be organized as commands or as separate armed services. The project draws directly on my time at CSIS, where I wrote on force planning, defense budgets, and industrial mobilization.

Policy Writing

Before starting my PhD, I was a research associate in the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), where I worked primarily with Mark Cancian and Kathleen Hicks on U.S. force structure, defense budgets, and industrial mobilization. A selection of my policy writing is below.