My primary research focus is in the area of economic sanctions. I am currently working on several projects in this area, including the political aspects of economic sanctions and the relationship between uses of economic force and uses of military force.

A second project that I am working on analyzes whether dyads with similar political regimes are less likely to engage in interstate conflict. In particular, we focus on similar types of non-democratic regimes. Do socialist states avoid military conflict with other socialist states? Do monarchies avoid military conflict with other monarchies? Do military dictatorships avoid conflict with other military dictatorships? We build on previous research in three ways. First, we add an additional regime category, monarchies. Second, we limit the single-party regime classification to socialist states. Third, we employ two new measures of conflict, the PRIO/Uppsala data on interstate conflicts and the International Crisis Behavior project’s data on interstate crises.

A third project proposes to investigate the relationship between the production and trafficking of illicit narcotics, the stability of political institutions, and the incidence of internal military conflict (civil wars). In preliminary statistical analyses related to this project, drug production and seizures were found to be significantly and positively associated with civil war while democracies were found to have fewer seizures of narcotics at their borders.