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Sanne Verschuren
Ph.D., Brown University Welcome!
I am an Assistant Professor of International Security at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies of Boston University. My research engages questions at the intersection of international security, the domestic determinants of defense policy, and the role of ideas, norms, and institutions in national security decision-making. My work focuses on how states fight war, from examining the choices that states make in the development of their military arsenals, to thinking about the role of the means and methods of warfare in planning for and the actual conduct of military operations, and to reflecting upon why certain technologies and practices become disregarded. In this context, I also explore the linkages and commonalities between traditionally divergent issue areas, such as conventional and nuclear capabilities or nuclear dangers and climate change. I am in the process of finalizing my first book manuscript, titled Imagining the Unimaginable: War, Weapons, and Procurement Politics. This book is based on my dissertation, which received APSA’s 2022 Kenneth N. Waltz Outstanding Dissertation Award. In the book, I ask why and how states decide to develop different weapon capabilities within a similar military domain—with the development of missile defenses by the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and India as the central case studies. Beyond the book manuscript, my research has appeared in Global Studies Quarterly, War on the Rocks, and Inkstick Media, among others. My research has been generously supported by the European Commission, the National Science Foundation, the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy, the Belgian American Education Foundation, the Tobin Project, Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia, and the Brown Graduate School. Before joining Boston University, I was a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow with Sciences Po's Center for International Studies, a Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, and a predoctoral research fellow with the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. I graduated with a LL.B. and LL.M. Magna Cum Laude from Ghent University and received a M.Sc. with Distinction in the Politics of Conflict, Rights and Justice from the School of Oriental and African Studies, as well as M.A. in Political Science from Brown University. |
