Ph.D. Candidate, Princeton SPIA

I am a Ph.D. Candidate at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs and a 2025–26 Visiting Scholar in Yale University’s Nuclear Security Program at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. My work sits at the intersection of international security, strategic studies, and the political economy of international organizations, with emphasis on deterrence, coercive diplomacy, nonproliferation, and alliance politics.

My current project, Strategies of Coercion in the Nuclear Era, asks three questions: When does coercion succeed without war? Which guarantees and institutional commitments move states from brinkmanship to cooperation? And what do alliances and international organizations signal in crises?

I explain that credible security guarantees and institutionalized cooperation—particularly within alliances and the United Nations—reshape expectations and increase the likelihood that coercive threats elicit compliance. The project draws on archival and declassified sources, original datasets, formal models, causal inference, and case studies of the UK–US nuclear partnership, North Korea, and Iran.

A second stream of my research examines international organizations and international interventions in statebuilding, fragile governments, and peacebuilding. I study how external actors—UN missions, regional organizations, and allied partners—affect governance capacity and patterns of violence, and how mandates and institutional unity condition local compliance. Conceptually and empirically, this stream complements my focus on war studies and international security: interventions alter the incentives, signals, and constraints that determine whether coercion and deterrence succeed.

Across projects I use mixed methods—archival work in U.S. and U.K. repositories, interviews with practitioners, formal modeling, statistical analysis, and survey/experimental evidence. My research has been supported by Princeton SPIA, the Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination (LISD), the Center for International Security Studies (CISS), PIIRS, and Yale University’s Nuclear Security Program at the MacMillan Center.