2014-15

Daniel Krcmaric

Daniel Krcmaric

Pre-Doctoral Fellow

Daniel Krcmaric is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Political Science at Duke University. His dissertation examines how the justice cascade, the recent trend toward holding leaders accountable for mass atrocities, influences civil conflict and political violence. He has held a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and a Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, and his work has been published in Security Studies. Prior to graduate school, Daniel studied political science and economics at the University of Notre Dame.

Joseph Torigian

Joseph Torigian

Pre-Doctoral Fellow

Joseph Torigian is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology specializing in qualitative methods, civil-military relations, and Chinese and Russian politics and foreign policy. Drawing on extensive primary source research, his dissertation, “Cleaning Up the Revolution,” investigates the nature of elite-level political authority in China and the Soviet Union in the Deng and Khrushchev eras, paying special attention to the role of the military in each case. Previously, Joseph worked as a research associate at the Council on Foreign Relations, studied at Fudan University in Shanghai on a Fulbright Scholarship, and conducted research in the Soviet archives on an IREX scholarship

Sara Bjerg Moller

Sara Bjerg Moller

Pre-Doctoral Fellow

Sara Bjerg Moller is doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University. Prior to undertaking her graduate studies, she worked as a Research Associate for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. She has also held research positions at the Brookings Institution, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Her research has been published in the Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, National Interest, Middle East Times, and World Politics Review. Her monograph “Lessons Learned and Unlearned: The Tenth Anniversary of September 11, 2001” won first place in the 2011 Richard A. Clarke National Scholarly Monograph Contest. Her dissertation explores the institutional design and effectiveness of military alliances and coalitions.

Olivier Henripin

Olivier Henripin

Visiting Scholar

Olivier Henripin is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University specializing in international relations and formal and quantitative methods. His dissertation, titled “Intractable Territorial Conflicts and the Strategic Social Construction of Indivisible National Homelands,” seeks to explain the origins of perceptions of indivisibility in territorial disputes and the conditions under which indivisibility fosters dispute intractability or, conversely, facilitates peaceful dispute resolution. His broader research interests include Chinese foreign policy, Sino-U.S. and Sino-Taiwanese relations, the bargaining approach to war, and domestic determinants of foreign policy. His research has been supported by fellowships from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of China (Taiwan), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Fonds québécois de recherche. He holds a B.A. in International Studies from the University of Montreal and an M.A. in Political Science from McGill University. During the 2010-2011 academic year, he was a visiting scholar in the Department of Diplomacy and Center for Foreign Policy Studies at the National Chengchi University in Taiwan.

Tyson Belange

Visiting Scholar

Tyson Belanger studies how states, especially democracies, use promise strategies to improve interstate war outcomes. Before Harvard, Tyson served as a Marine for six years and deployed overseas five times, three times to Iraq. Tyson earned his B.A. from Yale, where he served as student body president. Tyson has visited 50 U.S. states, 2 U.S. territories, and 81 countries.

Andy Levin

Visiting Scholar

My dissertation examines the impact of United Nations peacekeepers on local security during civil war. Although numerous studies find positive effects of UN operations at the country level, frequent reports of violence near UN bases raise questions about peacekeepers’ ability to credibly deter aggression. Using an original dataset of peacekeeping deployment in eight African civil wars, as well as case studies of UN operations in Burundi and Democratic Republic of Congo, I find no relationship between the spatial deployment of peacekeepers and local patterns of violence. Given peacekeepers’ limited dissuasive capacity, I contend that peacekeeping successes are primarily a result of the UN’s macro-level peacebuilding efforts.

Inwook Kim

Inwook Kim

PhD in Residence

Inwook Kim is a Ph.D. student in Political Science at the George Washington University. He is broadly interested in the relationship between oil and international security, and his dissertation focuses whether and how oil reinforces or undermines national security of oil-rich states. In addition, he also works on historical and contemporary inter-Korean relationship. Prior to joining GWU, Inwook has worked as a lecturer at Korea Military Academy for three years (1st Lt). He holds a BA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from Oxford University, and received a MA from London School of Economics. Inwook is a recipient of the Fulbright Scholarship.

Daniel Jacobs

Daniel Jacobs

PhD in Residence

Daniel Jacobs is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science at The George Washington University and a research assistant at the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies in the Elliott School of International Affairs. His current research interests include the strategic benefits of material and ideational vulnerability, autocratic accountability, and theories of grand strategic success. Daniel holds a M.A. (Hons) in International Relations from the University of Chicago and a B.A.(Hons) in Political Science from McGill University. When not studying international relations, Daniel is an aspiring barbecue pitmaster and canoe builder/woodworker.

Michael Joseph

Michael Joseph

PhD in Residence

Michael Joseph is a Ph.D. student (Political Science) at George Washington University. His research uses formal insights to explore how states determine the extent of each other’s motives and its consequences for war, trade and peace. He is passionate about the role of bad actors in international politics and is interested in how Western powers can single these states out and manage their bad behavior. His research draws from six years’ experience working in Iraq, Jordan and the United States in various analytical roles. In his spare time he makes ice cream and plays risk.