Research
Research Interests
My research asks how authority is constructed, bounded, sustained, and corrected in domains beyond territorial sovereignty. The spaces I study are legally organized as open, as non-appropriable, or as collectively administered. No state may simply own them. Yet states and international institutions keep turning claims over them into legal entitlements, administrative forms, and operating systems. I ask why conduct sometimes stabilizes without acknowledgment, why some claims enter law while others are refused, and what survives refusal. Also, I ask who can compel an established order, once built, to revise itself.
Dissertation Project
Authority without Territory: State Claims of Right in the Global Commons
Why are some state claims to bounded authority in legally open spaces acknowledged and incorporated into international law, while others stabilize conduct without ever being acknowledged, and still others fail while the administrative forms and operating systems built around them persist?
The dissertation’s central move is to separate three outcomes that are usually conflated — behavioral stabilization, expressed recognition (acknowledgment of a legal position, not recognition of a state), and legal incorporation — and to code each independently against dated baselines. Airlines may file flight plans while their governments deny that any duty exists. A treaty may create an entitlement before implementation becomes routine. What requires explanation is the combination a claim obtains, not a verdict of success or failure.
A parallel distinction separates four things that can outlive one another: the claim episode, the project, the form-type (a reusable administrative template), and the operational system. What looks like the survival of a claim is often the survival of a form, or of a running system, after the claim itself was refused.
Four cases carry the argument. The exclusive economic zone entered law through an authoritative revision of the underlying allocation rather than by assertion against it. Air defense identification zones show carriers adjusting, while the affected governments have refused the asserted relationship outright. The 1976 Bogotá Declaration was defeated as a claim but continued as a reformulated project. Australia’s 2004 maritime identification initiative serves as a hard negative. It shows that administrative zone language need not amount to an international claim of right.
Projects in Development
Building on the dissertation, I am developing two additional lines of research.
Claimed, delegated, and converted authority
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State Effects without Title: Flight Information Regions
Assigning responsibility for a flight information region does not transfer sovereign title, yet the provider can become the interface through which foreign users encounter a bounded volume. Comparing Jakarta–Singapore, Nicosia, and Athens FIRs, the article separates formal attribution, operational provision, and user attribution, and finds that they come apart and stay apart. -
Converting Extended Claims into Bounded Rights
A source-linked global census of national maritime legislation, asking on which clock coastal states converted extended offshore claims into the bounded UNCLOS form.
Material change and institutional corrigibility
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World Politics after Construction: Mediated Orders and the Authority to Correct
Why the 1976 Bogotá Declaration’s claim to the geostationary orbit failed against the International Telecommunication Union’s installed coordination order, and what that shows about who holds the authority to determine what counts as failure and who may change it. -
Environmental Compensation and Corrective Power in the International Seabed Regime
Why a compensation fund should stand last in the remedial sequence but first in institutional time, and when compensation redistributes the capacity to compel revision rather than absorbing shocks on an extractive order’s behalf. -
Territorialization and its Legal Limits in the Asia-Pacific
Construction adds land, and sea-level rise removes it, and international law translates neither automatically into entitlement. The project asks what moves when the legal position does not, beginning with a satellite-based measurement and event-study design for the reclamation at Antelope Reef. -
Climate Shock and State Claims of Right in Polar Governance
Whether the pressure released when polar space becomes materially accessible is absorbed by new claims of right, by existing delegated competences, or by collective administration.
Methods
Primary methods: qualitative and multi-method research design, process tracing, comparative historical analysis, comparative case study, archival research, panel and event-history analysis, difference-in-differences, geospatial analysis, and satellite remote sensing.
Additional Methods Coursework and Training: quantitative text analysis (text-as-data), network analysis, computational image and video analysis, design-based causal inference, regression and maximum likelihood estimation, time-series analysis, game theory, Bayesian process tracing, cartographic design, and data visualization.