About
I am a postdoctoral fellow at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin. My research interests lie at the nexus of international security, international political economy and foreign policy, with particular focus on economic sanctions and the determinants of sanction usage by governments, as well as the micro-level effects of economic statecraft.
My dissertation project, "Strategic Third-Party Actors in Economic Sanctions," focuses on how third-party actors affect the implementation of economic sanctions. Each of the three papers examines a different type of third-party actor and the role that it plays in the sanctioning process. These actors are, respectively, cooperative third-party states, non-cooperative third-party states, and private entities. In particular, I ask following questions: First, when do sanctioning states choose multilateral over unilateral sanctions? What factors make the costs of forming a sanctioning coalition worthwhile for the sanctioning state? Second, what are the geopolitical costs for imposing economic sanctions? Finally, under what conditions are the target states better able to withstand economic sanctions?
To answer these questions, I employ a multi-method approach. This includes utilizing matching to create non-existent counterfactual cases, creating a novel method by combining Time Series and triplet matching strategies, and constructing a novel dataset on sanction waivers granted by the United States.
In addition to my dissertation, I also have several co-authored works under review and in progress. These include papers on the impact of economic sanctions on women's rights and lived experiences in the target state, survey experiments on Filipino diplomats looking at how foreign service officers perceive international negotiations, and a novel semi-supervised item response theory method to measure the varieties of power, among others.
I received my PhD from the Department of Political Science at Duke University in the summer of 2023. I was previously supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation, which is funding one of my co-authored projects. For the academic year 2021-2022, I was a Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the America in the World Consortium. Previously, I was also a Carnegie Junior Scholar at the International Policy Scholars Consortium and Network.
