What factors affect the organization and efficacy of national cyber-defense efforts? In The Mice that Roar: What Small Countries Can Teach Great Powers About National Cyber-Defense, I argue that an important piece of the answer lies within the history and institutions of an often-overlooked yet significant sub-group of countries. Given that effective defense in cyberspace requires extensive civilian-military and public-private cooperation and coordination (a societal defense posture), American policymakers and academics alike frequently characterized national defense efforts in cyberspace as a significant departure from pre-existing kinetic national defense efforts in the domains of air, land, and sea. Notably, however, how states’ experience this disjuncture varies. In the case of the Mice that Roar, their pre-existing national defense approaches more closely resemble the desired solution set to national defense in cyberspace (Whole of Society) than the pre-existing approaches found in far larger powers like the United States (U.S.) or the United Kingdom (U.K.). Importantly, these architectures exist, in large part, precisely because these states are not historically strong and resource-rich. Crucially, the historical defense problem these states faced due to deep vulnerability born from their relative size and geopolitical position has key conceptual and operational similarities with the problem of critical interconnectedness (their dependence on and the interconnectivity of cyberspace) now facing all advanced industrial states in the cyber era. In other words, by solving for significant vulnerability, these states also solved, in part, for critical interconnectedness.

By focusing specifically on how a subset of relatively small yet successful states, the Mice that Roar, have pursued national cyber-defense, the dissertation’s argument and findings challenge two prevailing assumptions in security studies and cyber conflict scholarship: (1) that larger states with more resources will be better positioned to provide national defense for their populations and (2) that national cyber-defense, as a central task of states, represents a significant departure from the core requirements of national defense in the domains of air, land, and sea (i.e. that it represents a new type of defense problem for states to address).

In addition, my work promises to augment the study of cyber conflict in political science and contribute to policy discussions in two important ways. First, through a focus on often understudied countries in international security studies and cyber conflict studies, this dissertation takes an important step in the ongoing process of delineating systemic dynamics from situational dynamics in cyberspace: i.e. dynamics all states face due to the threat space versus dynamics that are significantly mediated through national contexts and circumstances. Second, this project illustrates that in our efforts to understand cybersecurity in the context of national security and pursue policy solutions, previously overlooked insights for the organization and efficacy of national cyber-defense efforts lay outside the more heavily studied histories of states such as the U.S.

Although there is increasing divergence among the trade policies of various Latin American nations, overall the last twenty years have seen a dramatic shift away from protectionism towards liberalization. Focusing on case studies of four Latin American nations — Brazil, Mexico, Chile and Argentina — the authors use an analytical framework to explain the rationales behind divergent policies. The analytical approach used considers the combination of economic, political and strategic objectives of policymakers in each country. Four governance modes of trade are used to categorize and describe the trade policies of each country: unilateralism, bilateralism, minilateralism (limited multilateralism, as in regional trade accords like Mercosur), and broader multilateralism (virtually unlimited membership arrangements like WTO). While the four countries share similar levels of economic and social development and have all moved towards trade liberalization, their trade preferences vary substantially and reflect not only economic orientations but also the political and security aims of each. The article ends by posing several questions for further exploration.

Governing Insecurity examines the various efforts to regulate, constrain, or ban military technology. In the process, it outlines the considerable variation in both the design of these frameworks and in compliance outcomes that existing theoretical work fails to explain. In this dissertation project, I present an original Arms Control Design Dataset (ACDD) to provide new data and methods to quantitatively assess the design features of arms control regimes and their effect upon state behavior---specifically compliance. I focus this analysis on agreement type, membership, type of verification regime, and the decision to include sunset provisions in four quantitative chapters. The dissertation concludes by considering the lessons learned from this analysis for future efforts to regulate military technologies.

This dissertation investigates the effects of international linkages on regional economic development in China, with a specific focus on China's burgeoning automotive industry. Whereas most scholars predicted that China's entry into the WTO would increase economic liberalization, I argue that China's WTO entry ironically enabled local governments to gain increased authority and incentives to undermine domestic competition by restricting the Chinese Central government's ability to monitor and control local protectionism. In order to enter the Chinese automotive industry, foreign corporations must form JVs with local governments. These governments frequently manipulate public policy to favor their JV partners over those of neighboring regions. Therefore, China's entry into the WTO has only resulted in what I call "fragmented liberalization," whereby sub-national governments selectively adopt measures of liberalization and protectionism rather than wholly adopt liberalizing measures imposed by the WTO on the Chinese Central government. Second, I also contend that multinational corporations are not necessarily the main drivers of liberalization as often assumed in the literature, in that the foreign partners within sub-national JVs foster fragmented liberalization in China. Third, while China has increasingly integrated its economy into the global economy, it has been using state-owned enterprises to promote economic development and industrial upgrading. Yet I find a great deal of variations in the extent to which state-owned enterprises have been able to engage in backward and forward linkages by drawing on their global automaker partners. Thus, understanding the micro-foundations of industrial policy is critical to understanding its impact on the global economy and international institutions. To show this, I conducted a structured comparative case study of three automotive JVs (Shanghai GM, Beijing Hyundai, and First Auto Works-Tianjin Toyota). I collected data through in-depth interviews and the analysis of secondary publications, primary documents and archival materials. I spent 18 months in China and conducted 112 in-depth interviews in Chinese, English, Korean and Japanese. My research highlights the importance of considering industrial policy at the sub-national level precisely because this is the level at which nation-to-nation agreements and national regulations are implemented and reinterpreted on the ground. By examining the interplay of international, national and sub-national politics, I show that international agreements like the WTO have complex effects that are both counterintuitive and heavily dependent on the local context.