I am a scholar of power asymmetries in the international order, studying how weaker states strategically shape international security institutions. These states are neither passive rule-takers nor unconstrained agents in the international order. My central argument is that they face a recurring governance dilemma: when the existing international order fails to address an emerging security threat, they must push for normative and legal adjustments while simultaneously constraining how great powers might abuse any revised framework. My book project traces how Latin American states navigated this dilemma during the crafting of humanitarian intervention norms, developing a theoretical framework for understanding how developing countries participate in adjusting the international order during moments of  order instability.

My ongoing research extends this framework by theorizing the specific mechanisms by which weaker states insert their preferences into international ordering processes. My empirical research spans multiple security domains and uses a mix of methods, including archival sources and cross-national public opinion surveys. In nuclear politics, my research challenges conventional dichotomies that structures mainstream nuclear scholarship, such as deterrence-disarmament and Global North-Global South. My empirical work on the global nuclear order grounds my broader theoretical claim that dominant frameworks for international security governance reflect great-power logics that poorly capture the preferences and strategies of the rest of international society.

Latin America is my primary empirical focus throughout my research portfolio. This is a region whose centuries-long, understudied tradition of active order-making in international security exemplifies the governance dilemmas and creative strategies that define the bounded agency of weaker states in the international order.

Book Manuscript

Latin American states long championed the nonintervention principle. Why, then, did they help build the Responsibility to Protect, a norm that could authorize military force in response to humanitarian crises? My first book manuscript, Orders to Protect: Latin America, Humanitarian Intervention, and Constraints on Great Powers, shows they joined the negotiations to set R2P’s terms. Drawing on the diplomatic record and interviews with negotiators, I trace the different approaches Brazil, Chile, and Mexico used to make collective responses to atrocities possible while building in constraints against their abuse. Republican ordering, the framework I develop, runs counter to accounts of the international order that rest on great power restraint: Latin American governments sought rules and institutions that constrain powerful states regardless of their intentions. Reaching from a century of Latin American diplomatic thought to current debates over nuclear weapons and autonomous weapons systems, the book shows how the Global South helps order international politics – and what happens when great powers stop respecting international rules.

Work in Progress

Working Papers

  • Creative Expedience and the Latin American Origins of the Global Nuclear Order,” under review.

  • “What Is a Nuclear Weapon? Imprecision, Bargaining, and the Limits of International Security Law,” with Debak Das, under review.

  • “Global Public Opinion on Nuclear Energy Polarized in Shadow of Zaporizhzhia,” with Lauren Sukin, Stephen Herzog, et al., under review.

Work in Progress

  • Equally Unhappy: Persistent Dilemmas for Latin America in the Global Nuclear Order, book project.

  • “Contingency, Bureaucratic Lock-In, and Nuclear Latency in Latin America,” with Agostina Dasso and Luis Schenoni.

  • “Process Lessons for Nuclear Diplomacy: How the Negotiation Journeys of Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zones Can Inform the Middle East,” with Hassan Elbahtimy and Karla Mae Pabelina, commissioned paper by the United Nations Office of Disarmament Affairs.

  • “Nuclear Military Transit at Sea: Reformist Contestation and Innocent Passage,” with Elizabeth Mendenhall.

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I am a member of different research initiatives on nuclear governance, including:

  • The Research Consortium “Re-writing the Constitutional History of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty,” organized by the University of Southampton with funding from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and in collaboration with the Wilson Center,

  • The Alva Myrdal Center Working Group on Nuclear Disarmament and Non-Proliferation, organized by Uppsala University,

  • The steering committee of the “Arms Control and Emerging Technologies Next-Gen Working Group: An International Network for New Thinking on Deterrence,” organized by CSIS and IFSH, and

  • Harvard Belfer Center and MacArthur Foundation’s Research Network on Rethinking Nuclear Deterrence.

I co-organized an inter-disciplinary network of scholars with the Latin America in a Globalizing World Initiative at Johns Hopkins University and the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University. I co-edited a special issue with Christy Thornton for the Cambridge Review of International Affairs with papers by scholars in this network on Latin American engagements with the liberal international order.

Find more information about my research projects on my C.V.