research

Research Interests

international security · international law and institutions · historical international relations · political geography and geopolitics · maritime, airspace, and outer space governance

My work bridges international relations, international law, and political geography, centering on how states claim authority over the global commons. My research examines the emergence and stabilization of state claims of right in the global commons, such as the high seas, international airspace, and outer space that lie beyond any single state’s territory. I am interested in how states advance claims to authority over spaces that no one owns, and why some of those claims become accepted as durable forms of authority while others are resisted or collapse.

Dissertation Project

My dissertation, Authority without Territory: State Claims of Right in the Global Commons, asks why some state attempts to establish sovereignty-related authority over legally open commons become stabilized as accepted claims of right, while others fail.

The project develops a theory of authority without territory. It examines arrangements in which a state claims the right to regulate, identify, appropriate, or exclude within the global commons while stopping short of full territorial sovereignty and preserving the commons freedoms of others. I argue that such claims stabilize when three conditions interlock: accommodation by the powers capable of disrupting them, resonance of the vocabularies through which they are legitimated, understood as uptake by relevant audiences rather than fit with a pre-existing order, and constructive ambiguity that allows rival actors to accept the same arrangement for different reasons. These arrangements stabilize not through convergence on what they ultimately mean, but by holding disagreement open within a framework the parties continue to share.

The empirical chapters trace this logic across four cases. The exclusive economic zone and air defense identification zones are stabilized claims at opposite ends of a spectrum of legalization. The Australian Maritime Identification Zone and the Bogotá Declaration are failures of opposite kinds: the first never consolidated into an accepted claim of right, while the second overreached toward full sovereignty and collapsed the ambiguity on which accommodation depended. Drawing on historical, legal, and policy evidence, the project shows how global order is made not only through territorial sovereignty or international administration, but also through limited and contested claims of authority in spaces that remain legally open.

In the book version, I plan to extend the argument to Arctic governance, where climate change, new infrastructure, and renewed strategic competition are unsettling the boundary between commons, territory, and jurisdiction.

Projects in Development

Building on the dissertation, I am developing three related lines of research.

Delegated versus claimed authority in the skies

This project compares air defense identification zones and flight information regions to ask why authority claimed as a state’s own right stabilizes differently from authority exercised under international delegation. It develops the distinction between limited sovereign spaces and delegated commons governance.

Commons governance beyond national claims

This project examines arrangements that fall outside the dissertation’s main scope, including the deep seabed regime, the Moon Agreement, and closed or semi-closed forms of collective management such as the Caspian Sea. It asks why some commons are placed under international management or small-club governance rather than becoming objects of state claims of right. It also uses them to explain why bounded national claims of right, rather than collective or international management, are so often the forms that endure.

Territorialization, infrastructure, and constructed space in the Asia-Pacific

This project studies efforts to convert open or ambiguous maritime spaces into controlled territory, including artificial islands and maritime infrastructures in the South China Sea and broader Asia-Pacific. It asks how built features, strategic competition, and climate vulnerability reshape the relationship between sovereignty, territory, and the sea.

Across these projects, I combine qualitative and multi-method research with legal analysis, geospatial tools, and computational approaches where appropriate.

Methods

Primary methods: qualitative and multi-method research design, process tracing, comparative historical analysis, comparative case study

Additional training: quantitative text analysis (text-as-data), network analysis, design-based causal inference, regression and maximum likelihood estimation, game theory, Bayesian process tracing, discourse analysis and genealogy, ethnographic methods, geospatial analysis and remote sensing (ArcGIS, QGIS), data visualization, programming in Python, R, and Stata