Biography
Steven received his PhD from Georgetown University’s Department of Government in 2012. He also holds an MA in Security Studies from Georgetown’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. He conducts research, writes, and teaches in the area of international relations, especially international security. He is currently engaged in two major research projects. The first explores the relationship between status concerns and domestic politics in the context of relative decline. The second investigates the role of tripwire forces as deterrent signals. His first book – Status and the Challenge of Rising Powers (Cambridge University Press, 2017) – explains how status anxiety can push rising states to launch costly, risky challenges to the international status quo, and tests this account against the records of Wilhelmine Germany, Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, and the United States around the turn of the 20th century. His work has been published in Security Studies, International Studies Quarterly, the Review of International Studies, International Theory, the Journal of Global Security Studies, and International Interactions, and has been featured in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog.
Steven was previously Assistant Professor of Government and Associate Director of the Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies at Cornell University.
Publications
Book:
Status and the Challenge of Rising Powers (Cambridge University Press, 2017)
Marketing flier
Reviewed in Rising Powers Quarterly (by Axel Dessein)
Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles:
“Logics of Stratified Identity Management in World Politics” (International Theory, 2019)
“Race, Status, and Japanese Revisionism in the Early 1930s” (Security Studies, 2013)
Related MonkeyCage post
Book Reviews:
Research in Progress (please email Steven for updated working papers):
Decline and Disintegration: Eroding Status and Civil Conflict in Post-Disaster Spain (working paper – revise and resubmit at International Security)
Tripwires and Support for Intervention: Evidence from Survey Experiments (working paper with Paul Musgrave)
Related MonkeyCage post
National Status, National Decline, and Domestic Conflict (working paper)
Status and the Politics of National Decline (book project)
Tripwires and American Foreign Policy (book project with Paul Musgrave)