My research interests lie at the intersection of international security and international institutions. Specifically, I seek to understand international efforts to regulate the tools with which humans kill, hurt, and threaten one another. I use a mixed methods approach to investigate three types of questions.

First, I examine the politics of multilateral weapons governance. My book manuscript, Weapons Governance by the Weak, examines how smaller states develop multilateral agreements to govern weapons and how they navigate great powers’ responses to their efforts. Smaller states have long been active in multilateral weapons governance, but their endeavors have produced a variety of different types of agreements. What explains these differences? Under what conditions do these agreements reflect and advance smaller states’ goals? This book argues that in pursuing multilateral weapons governance agreements, smaller states face a critical choice of how much to compromise with great powers. This choice, combined with the extent to which great powers support or oppose the initiative, explains variation in the outcome of their efforts. I demonstrate how the choices made in these strategic interactions lead to different kinds of governance in comparative case studies of the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty, and the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

In related work with Steven Ward (University of Cambridge), I assess how small states can mount revisionist challenges to international order, through a case study of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. This research is published in the European Journal of International Relations. Additionally, in research published in the Journal of Strategic Studies, I examine how anticipatory governance efforts to regulate emerging technologies may lead to hollow agreements that regulate technologies never developed. I demonstrate these dynamics using a case comparison of agreements to ban weapons that produce fragments not detectable by X-rays and to regulate lasers designed to blind.

Second, I use survey experiments to understand public opinion regarding nuclear weapons and international agreements. My research has examined Chinese public opinion regarding nuclear weapons (with Lincoln Hines, Georgia Institute of Technology, and published in Research & Politics) and the effectiveness of praising versus shaming on public support for joining international treaties (published in the Review of International Organizations). In ongoing research projects, I use survey experiments to a) examine the potentially permissive effects of the nuclear taboo and b) assess public opinion in NATO countries regarding nuclear deterrence and NATO’s nuclear mission (with Steven Ward, University of Cambridge).

Finally, my research examines how participation in international institutions and negotiations shapes countries’ preferences and policies. In work with Nina Obermeier (King’s College London), published in the Journal of Politics, we develop a new method for estimating the effect of participating in international organizations on states’ preference similarity. In ongoing research, I assess how bilateral and multilateral nuclear negotiations shape one another.