Book Project

 

The Price of Certainty

Artificial Intelligence, Decision-Making, and the Future of Conflict

The Price of Certainty offers the first systematic assessment of how AI systems, and the tools they produce, will reshape political and military decision-making. These technologies offer faster-than-human calculations and will perform at speeds beyond human comprehension. As their operational benefits become visible (enabling quicker and decisive guidance), however, they will definitively reform how we, as humans, think about, understand, and act in the world (McGill-Queens University Press)

Working Papers

  • Certainty and Decision-Making

    This paper explores how human decision-makers address uncertainty amid political crises, engaging a mixed-methodological approach including structured interviews, surveys, and archival text and discourse analysis. The paper concludes with a discussion about key challenges and frictions regarding how human decision-makers may navigate uncertainty in partnership with AI-enabled systems.

  • The Teleology of AI

    This paper explores how prominent technology companies describe and promote the AI tools they build. Using both discourse and content analysis, this paper outlines a potential teleology of emerging technology and identifies how technologists tend to explain the purposes of advanced automated/AI tools. Understanding the teleology of AI is critical for addressing societal implications for the balance of power between private and public sector actors, pathways towards technological regulation, and the future of the politics.

  • Media Reform in an Age of Misinformation

    This paper highlights the susceptibility of commercial/profit-based media business models in an age of mis- and disinformation, and proposes institutional reforms in support of a new publicly-funded, service-based information model. The paper argues these changes are necessary to address a range of contemporary challenges, from effective regulation of technology to improving democratic decision-making in the age of AI.

 

Publications

 

Italy’s Other Wave: Protests During the Second Lockdown

with Andrea Ruggeri (Oxford); Giuseppe Spatafora (Oxford), Fabio D’Aguanno (Oxford)

The short research article explores the trends in political and social unrest in Italy over the COVID-19 regulations in the autumn of 2020. Published on OxPol (December 2020).

Formulating Research Questions & Designing Research Projects in International Relations

with Andrea Ruggeri (Oxford)

Forthcoming chapter in The SAGE Handbook of Research Methods in Political Science and International Relations”, Luigi Curini and Rob Franzese (eds.).

WORDS @ WAR 

2018 - PRESENT

The study of international relations was borne in war. The inaugural research chair in the subject—the Woodrow Wilson Chair in International Politics, at Aberystwyth—was occupied by Alfred Eckhard Zimmern in 1919, as body counts were being tallied after the "Great War." Zimmern would be intimately involved in the construction of the League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations, whose covenant enshrined that all high-consenting parties, “In order to promote international co-operation and to achieve international peace and security” agree “by the acceptance of obligations not to resort to war.” Christened in this manner, and empowered to reduce the risk of conflict, IR has considerably expanded its perspectives of interest, while keeping central this responsibility to understand the interactions of nation-states in an effort to minimise conflict.

Words @ War, follows in this tradition while critically examining an understudied and overlooked aspect of international relations theory: the role of culture and, specifically, literature in shaping the patterns of conflict. Words @ War studies how fictional accounts of previous and contemporary wars have acculturated the American political landscape with specific images, themes, and schemas which, in turn, have framed how political actors discuss and make decisions about modern conflict. 

INSURGENT GROUP SURVIVAL

2016 - PRESENT

This project explores a set of interrelated questions: How do insurgent groups adapt? Why are some able to adapt better than others? Under what conditions should groups be more capable of adaptation? What does the variation between groups tell us about their wider life-cycles and patterns of survival? While both qualitative and quantitative approaches have generated considerable insights into the conditions under which insurgencies emerge, endure, splinter, and eventually resolve, there are few targeted investigations into how insurgent groups adapt. Further, there is a dearth of focused study on the variation in survival rates for insurgent groups, with models failing to explain how certain insurgencies endure for generations while others disappear in months—particularly given the heterogeneity of insurgent group in each of these categories.

My current work builds an original conceptual and theoretical framework for assessing insurgent adaptability.

Locations of violence perpetrated by Boko Haram in Nigeria

Locations of violence perpetrated by Boko Haram in Nigeria

CIVILIAN DEFENSE FORCES

2015 - PRESENT

Are civilians passive observers in domestic conflict? Do locally-organized, armed civilians affect patterns of violence in conflict? What impact does the structure of these local groups have on the behaviours of insurgent and incumbent forces in conflict?  This project argues that the presence or emergence of Civilian Defense Forces (CDFs) have consequences for the study of conflict in the international system, as these groups influence dynamics of violence in intrastate conflicts and patterns of war-time governance.

Parties to conflict.png

This project adopts a nested analysis methodology, corrects our definition of CDFs, constructs a theoretical framework that gives agency to civilians’ organization in domestic conflict, provides quantitative findings to highlight general patterns and explores the causal mechanisms that explain CDF impact on dynamics of conflict qualitatively.

My qualitative work explores four case studies: the Philippines, Indonesia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Sudan. Drawing on the substantial literature of civil war and comparative governance studies, the project seeks to explain how local, self-organized armed groups can influence the practices of violence during intra-state conflict.

ADAPTABILITY, IDEOLOGY, AND REBELLION (AIR) DATASET

2018 -2020

Photo by monsitj/iStock / Getty Images

The Adaptability, Ideology, and Rebellion (AIR) Dataset on Armed Groups and Insurgents aims to quantitatively measure group level variables on ideological strength, leadership, and organizational institutions. The data gathering will use the Non-State Actor Data (NSA) (Cunningham et al 2009) as the master data structure and will enable the new data to be used and merged with a vast collection of existing data sources, using the NAG as the unit of analysis. Starting in 2018, the AIR project will update missing NSA group characteristics for armed groups world-wide since 1945, creating a new extended and comprehensive dataset featuring vital non-material factors.