Research

There are many conditions that require states to seek special financing quickly in international markets, such as when facing imminent war or in immediate post-disaster reconstruction. However, standard sovereign debt financing can be seen as a highly constrained environment, where international lenders are cautious about debt default and sustainability risks. This greatly inhibits both the speed and amount raised in special sovereign bond issues under such circumstances. In this paper, we present a theoretical structure for sovereign financing in the international market that seeks to ameliorate such risks. We term this structure defibrillative financing as it is designed as a stop-gap, emergency financing structure, and not as a replacement for longer term financing that could require significant amounts of negotiation. This proposed structure would have deep implications in war finance literature as it lowers the cost barrier of short-term wars considerably.

China's rapid rise, concurrent with the erosion of the U.S. unipolar moment, has motivated a renaissance in the study of Power Transition Theory (PTT). Yet modern PTT scholars still rely largely on traditional formal and qualitative methods, limiting their ability to perform rigorous statistical tests of their hypotheses. By harnessing 52,189 separate observations of Chinese actions directed towards the U.S. and its allies since 1994, we break from this traditional orthodoxy and construct a novel time series dataset of mean weekly Chinese-initiated interactions with the U.S. Analysis of this dataset identifies trends in Chinese behavior consistent with those of a dissatisfied challenger. In fact, the data demonstrates that Chinese-initiated interactions with the U.S. took on a significant negative trajectory when China reached power "parity," confirming PTT scholars' expectations. This finding and the time series methodology harnessed to arrive at it have significant empirical and methodological implications for the study of U.S.-China relations narrowly and PTT broadly.

Within the existing Comparative Politics literature, commodity prices's influence over the occurrence of civil conflict has been well established. At the same time, many International Relations scholars believe that domestic instability increases the risk of interstate disputes and diversionary wars. Yet despite the evident relationship between these two theories, outside of the study of oil prices, proportionally little effort has been made to bridge the gap between them. This raises an obvious puzzle: Have fluctuations in commodity prices empirically influenced the prevalence of inter-state disputes? If so, what commodities (other than oil) played a role? And how often did such disputes escalate to full-scale conflicts? To answer these questions, we utilize the Correlate of War's Militarized Interstate Disputes (MIDs) data, publicly available commodity price datasets, existing protest count figures, and a zero-inflated Poisson sequential stage regression model. Our analysis yields two significant findings. First, an increase in the price of inconsumable agricultural products (cash crops), exceptionally among non-petroleum commodities, is associated with the occurrence of MIDs. From this we can infer that cash crops are unique in that they provide both the means and motive for conflict initiation. Essentially, rising cash crop profits can be captured by the state easily, and that rising cash crop prices undermine a society's domestic stability. Second, commodity price shock-induced unrest does in fact demonstrate a nontrivial association with the occurrence of interstate war. This has significant theoretical implications bridging the gap between the literatures on commodity prices, civil conflict and diversionary war.

In international relations literature, it has been argued that global commodity prices influence the outbreak of war through diversionary means. However, there does not exist a commonly accepted explanation of the mechanisms of occurrence. I theorize a mechanism of occurrence by connecting existing work on how commodity prices influence domestic welfare and how domestic welfare can in turn spawn interstate conflict. Using composite data constructed from commodity indices, trade behavior, and existing conflict datasets, I develop and test models that demonstrate the existence of such a mechanism. By examining the inner workings of commodity trading firms and their relationships with state actors, I also show how financialization of the commodity market ameliorates the diversionary effect of price shocks through hedging strategies by market participants. The results shed light on what to expect in the future, where climate change can drastically affect the commodity markets in ways such as increased crop failures from natural disasters, or storm surges affecting global logistics and shipping. The mechanisms outlined in my research would help in both forecasting and shaping risk-mitigation decisions by both public and private stakeholders.