Research

Social Relations of War-Making

My primary research is concerned with how the U.S. has been able to wage a series of expansive wars in the twenty-first century without significant disruptions to the everyday lives of workers, citizens, and elites. How have the social consequences of war changed over time? What explains the seemingly “endless” expansion of war in the twenty-first century?

My dissertation, Making Endless War: Neoliberal War-Making and the Social Transformation of the U.S. Military-Industrial Complex, aims to answer these questions by investigating the changing social relations of war-making in the neoliberal era. Using newly compiled quantitative data and archival materials, I trace the transnational entanglements of war and capitalism from warzones in Vietnam and Iraq to bases and supply chains circling the globe. In response to multiple crises in the 1970s, military and industrial elites embraced organizational and technological transformations of war at three key moments of its making: On the battlefield, a conscript army was replaced by capital-intensive weapons systems and small, rapid-deployment forces. At the point of production, armaments workers’ structural and associational bargaining power was undermined by geographical and organizational fixes. And in global military supply chains, just-in-time techniques meant increasing emphasis on non-citizen migrant service workers in the logistics networks of war.

My work shows how these transformations have allowed war in the twenty-first century to be waged with fewer social and political constraints than in the past and resulted in a war-making apparatus that required little participation from workers and citizens—facilitating “endless” war. However, these same flexible social arrangements placed disenchanted US industrial workers and precarious migrant laborers at strategic chokepoints, leaving the US military-industrial complex vulnerable to disruption in the twenty-first century.

I have also begun work on a second project in this area, which will focus on the relationship between climate change and U.S. war-making in the twenty-first century.

The Social Foundations of Global Governance

The theme of global governance is at the center of my collaborative work at the Arrighi Center for Global Studies. Partly, this has involved (with a team led by Sahan Savas Karatasli) the creation of a new database on global social unrest from 1851 to the present using events reported in the international press, including The New York Times and The Guardian, with the goal of mapping social movements through space and time, and comparing the current period with historically analogous periods of heightened global movements. In addition to the team data collection and analysis, my work in this area (co-authored with Beverly Silver) has been concerned with the social bases of world hegemony—in essence, how social and labor movements have interacted with geopolitics and global governance historically and what an analysis of such interactions can tell us about the present.

The Historical Dynamics of Global Capitalism

My research in this area focuses on the longue durée relationship between wealth and power between the capitalist core and peripheries. This has involved work on world-systems analysis and methodologies, as well as research into the changing structure of the interstate system.

My work in this area has also included the World-Magnates Project, a multi-faceted collaborative study on the richest individuals in historical capitalism—the historical analogues of today’s billionaires—from the mid-fifteenth century to the present. This project has resulted in a dataset of these individuals, using them as indicators of centers of wealth accumulation that can be mapped in space, time, and industry—identifying patterns of political and economic transformation with the goal of enhancing our understanding of elite networks, uneven development, and social inequality. An article from this project which I co-authored with Roberto Patricio Korzeniewicz was the winner of the 2020 Distinguished Article Award from the Political Economy of the World-System Section of the American Sociological Association.