PROFESSIONAL STATEMENT

I am a scholar of international security. Over the course of my career, I have focused successively on four major topics. The first of these was the global arms industry. My dissertation dealt with the impact of what was called the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) on the North American defense sector, exploring how this change in the character of warfighting gave rise to a new mode of defense production – “military fordism.”

​

The second focus of my scholarly attention was the RMA itself. I spent most of this phase of my career exploring both contemporary and historical episodes of rapid transformation in what I called the “social mode of warfare” – that is, the ways in which state-society complexes organized for and prosecuted wars. During this phase, I wrote a number of government reports, book chapters and articles in journals such as European Journal of International Relations.

​

The third focus of my scholarship, again evolving out of the previous one, had to do with medieval warfare and, more broadly, with medieval geopolitics. During this period, I immersed myself in the military historiography of the era, and especially on the historiography of the crusades. During the decade or so that I devoted to the geopolitics of this era, I published a number of articles in peer-reviewed journals like International Studies Quarterly.  I also published two scholarly monographs – one at the beginning of my “medieval period” (Theorizing Medieval Geopolitics) and the other at the close of that period (Medieval Sovereignty) – and a novel (The Holy Lance: A Novel of the Third Crusade). While in some ways a hiatus from my overall scholarly project of trying to understand – and make understandable – contemporary geopolitics, this was a very fruitful period for me intellectually as it deepened both my sense of both the historicity of war as a macro-social phenomenon and those elements of it that seem constant and unchanging.

​

Finally, in recent years my focus has been on the geopolitics of the Indo-Pacific region and related topics of great power competition, US grand strategy and Chinese foreign policy. I say “in recent years,” but this has actually been a thread that I can trace back to the earliest years of my career. I have written on aspects of Chinese foreign policy on and off over the decades, have spent some time in China and have regularly taught courses on China and its (evolving) role on the world stage. While there will doubtless be a fifth phase in my career, for the foreseeable future I will be plunging ever more deeply into fascinating topic of China and its evolving role on the international stage.

Though I am best described as a scholar, I also consider myself a public intellectual. In this capacity, I have written numerous policy reports, done innumerable public presentations on international affairs, made any number of appearances in the media, supported Canadian diplomatic delegations, had a regular column on medieval geopolitics (at Medievalists.net) and more recently begun publishing commentary, analysis and opinion pieces in public-facing outlets like The Hill, The Diplomat, RealClearDefense and Strategy Bridge