Political Economy of Alliances
A prominent topic in the political economy of security is the political economy of alliances. A political-economic perspective on alliances is most famously attributed to Hedley Bull and Zeckhauser and Olson, who delved into claims of "free-riding" within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (i.e. that the United States was contributing a disproportionate amount of resources towards the alliances).
My own research makes two contributions to our understanding of how military alliance pacts are connected to economic issues: (1) identify the effectiveness of states choosing to directly and explicitly link economic cooperation to security cooperation, and (2) unveil the conditions under which a state trades “allies” for “arms”, meaning the decision to acquire an ally influences the resources the states dedicates towards arms.
Click on a link below to see my research in one of these two areas:
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