I’m an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. My research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of international conflict and cooperation. I pursue two related lines of inquiry:

First, I am interested in how adversaries can manage and resolve their disagreements. Most of my work has focused on the design and effects of security institutions and I have conducted research on two substantive areas of security cooperation: conflict management agreements and military alliances. I want to understand which types of agreements work, why they are effective, when they are more or less likely to succeed, and why they are designed the way they are. More recently, I have also started to explore broader questions of how states reconcile and move toward friendly relations. As part of this research, I look at costly signals of reconciliation that adversaries send to one another as well as at international apologies.

Second, I study the effect of domestic politics on countries’ foreign policy behavior and especially their willingness and ability to pursue international cooperation.

My work has appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, International Organization, Journal of Politics, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Peace Research, and Conflict Management and Peace Science. I was a Co-PI on an NSF-funded data collection project on changes in leaders’ domestic supporting coalitions and am currently a Co-PI on a DoD Minerva-funded project on domestic security institutions. I am also an affiliate of the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, the Institute for International Studies, the Institute of European Studies, and the Center on the Politics of Development.