Welcome!

I am an Associate Professor of International Relations at the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Hong Kong. Prior to starting at HKU, I was a Post-doctoral Fellow at the Institute for Politics and Strategy at Carnegie-Mellon University. I received my Ph.D from the University of California, Los Angeles in  2014. 

My main ongoing research project concerns the causes and effects of  partisan electoral interventions by the great powers, attempting to determine why such interventions occur and what are their effects. I examine these questions utilizing a dataset (PEIG) I constructed of such U.S. and USSR/Russian interventions between 1946 and 2000 as well as, among other things, in-depth archival research into cases in which such an intervention had been seriously considered by a great power. The first part of this project became in 2020 a  book “Meddling in the Ballot Box: the Causes and Effects of Partisan Electoral Interventions” at  Oxford University Press that won the Robert Jervis & Paul Schroeder Best Book Award for 2021 by the American Political Science Association. 

I have fourteen academic publications, including articles  at Terrorism and Political Violence and at Journal of Conflict Resolution on the effects of partisan electoral interventions on domestic terrorism and the determinants of the views of the American public on partisan electoral interventions by the U.S. and in International Organization on the effects of whataboutism in international diplomacy. Other research projects of mine have examined, for example, domestic factors that discourage alliance disengagement, the causes of regional war and peace, differences in foreign policy preferences between western and non-western publics, as well as the customary law of war.

A reference to my research was made in a 2018 British  House of Commons report about Russia and Russian foreign policy.  I have written an op-eds in the Washington Post (Monkey Cage)  Lawfare and War on the Rocks  about the Russian intervention in the 2016 U.S. election and how to deal with such future meddling, given interviews on partisan electoral interventions to CNN, NPR,  BBC World, USA Today and other media outlets, and  have served as a consulted/ quoted expert for multiple news segments and articles on this  and related topics for various media organs around the world. I also wrote (w/Wilfred Chow) a recent piece at Foreign Affairs about our findings regarding the effect of whataboutism.