Book Manuscript

My book, tentatively entitled The Statecraft of Restraint: the League of Nations, United Nations, and Multilateral Regulation of the Systemic Risk of Interstate Wars, will explore the theory and practice of collective security, paying special attention to the founding of the League of Nations (1920-46) and United Nations (1945-) as organizations of collective security. It is a mixed-methods study, which combines extensive archival research with state-of-the-art quantitative techniques such as risk propagation on networks, dynamic topic modelling, and inverse reinforcement learning. The book derives a strategic explanation for the rise and fall of collective security by conceptualizing that institutional form as a particular instance of the broader practice of multilateral pacification. A theoretical model of multilateral pacification is proposed. Drawing on cutting-edge research in computer science and financial engineering, a mathematical specification of that model is then developed and fitted to quantitative data using a supercomputer. Core implications of the model are evaluated in extensive case studies of the institutional imaginations of the founders of the League of Nations and United Nations as well as many public intellectuals who advocated for collective security through the first half of the twentieth century.

Publications

• “Jus contra Bellum in the Modern States System: Reflections on the Anomalous Origins of the Crime of Aggressive War", St Antony's International Review, vol. 10, no. 2 (2015), pp. 141-67; access a copy of this paper here.

• “At the Crossroads of Law and Licence: Reflections on the Anomalous Origins of the Crime of Aggressive War”, in Historical Origins of International Criminal Law, vol. 1, edited by Morten Bergsmo, Cheah Wui Ling, and Yi Ping (Brussels: Torkel Opsahl Academic EPublisher, 2014), pp. 409-35; access a copy of this chapter here.