Research

Notre Dame International Security Center Director Michael Desch has been named to a New York Council on Foreign Relations study group on “The U.S. Pivot to Asia and American Grand Strategy.” He will join other top experts from the public and private sectors to discuss the conceptual origins of the pivot; the pivot and U.S. vital national interests; its effects over the last decade on Asia, the Middle East, and Europe; its impact on U.S. defense policy, intelligence assets, and economic statecraft; and the proper distribution of U.S. national security resources in the period ahead.  …

James Webb, former U.S. Senator from Virginia, has been a combat Marine, a counsel in the Congress, an assistant secretary of defense and Secretary of the Navy, an Emmy-award winning journalist, a filmmaker, a professor of literature, a resident fellow at two of America’s most prestigious universities, and is the author of 10 books. Webb graduated from the Naval Academy in 1968, one of 18 midshipmen to receive...

It is normally assumed that international security regimes such as the UN can reduce the risk of war by increasing transparency among adversarial nations.  The more adversaries understand each other’s intentions and capabilities, the thinking goes, the less likely they are to be led to war by miscalculations and unwarranted fears. But how is transparency provided, how does it actually work, and how effective is it in preserving or restoring peace?  In Promoting Peace with Information, Dan Lindley provides...

The claim: Kamala Harris refused to salute members of the military while boarding Air Force Two -   Shortly after a video emerged of Vice President Kamala Harris not saluting troops while boarding Air Force Two on March 19 in Georgia, some users took to social media to claim that she had disrespected the military and violated protocol.  Experts weigh in - Michael Desch, a professor of political science and the director of the Notre Dame International Security Center, told USA TODAY that until President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, "it was not common for the president, or other Cabinet officials, but especially the president, to return hand salutes."  Desch noted that Reagan's successors ...

What is status? How does it work? What effects does it tend to have? A new wave of scholarship on status in international relations has converged on a central definition of status, several causal pathways, and the claim that the pursuit of status tends to produce conflict. The authors take stock of the status literature and argue that this convergence is not only a sign of progress, but also...

At the National People’s Congress last week, China announced its grand strategy to win in a post-pandemic world. While much of the media’s attention focuses on anti-democratic measures against Hong Kong, the more momentous steps may be China’s attempts to increase connectivity abroad and cultural homogeneity at home. Both are likely to backfire...

How do intellectual leaders of professional schools of international affairs, whose institutions primarily educate and train master's students for careers in government, the non-governmental sector, and the private sector, differ from academic administrators in disciplinary departments, whose primary raison d’être is producing the next generation of scholars whose primary task is to conduct basic research, in terms of how they see the academic enterprise and their expectations of faculty research and writing? The results...  

The United States of America was founded on a conspiracy theory. In the lead-up to the War of Independence, revolutionaries argued that a tax on tea or stamps is not just a tax, but the opening gambit in a sinister plot of oppression. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were convinced — based on "a long train of abuses and usurpations" — that the king of Great Britain was conspiring to establish "an absolute Tyranny" over the colonies.

This year is the 20th anniversary of the Women, Peace, and Security agenda. Not nearly at its midpoint, 2020 has already been a year of significant disruption. Amid a global pandemic, recession, and anti-racism protests, the security ideals upon which nations have been built are in flux. Nations are faced with systems that no longer serve...

Scholars have often dismissed the effect of war on state formation in regions like Latin America, where mobilization for war is deemed insufficiently intense and international conflict fails to out‐select weaker states. Against this conventional wisdom, I contend that wars can affect state‐building trajectories in a postwar period through the different state institutions that result from...