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Student Bio | |
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Stefano Recchia
Student, GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
Current
International Relations
Political Science |
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Biography
Dissertation:
It’s the Pentagon, Stupid! Understanding U.S. Multilateralism for Post-Cold War Military Interventions.
My dissertation develops a theory that explains why and under what conditions the United States government seeks the endorsement of standing international organizations (IOs), such as the UN, NATO, or the OAS, for prospective military interventions. I am particularly interested in the micro-dynamics of multilateral legitimacy; that is, I investigate who among Washington’s main bureaucratic players is most interested in multilateral legitimacy, and for what reasons. I hypothesize (somewhat counterintuitively) that in the face of U.S. domestic pressure to intervene when no core American interests are at stake, U.S. military commanders and other Pentagon leaders are among the staunchest advocates in Washington of seeking formal multilateral endorsement for the use of force. I expect that the endorsement of relevant IOs, obtained before the initiation of offensive military action,is particularly valuable to commanders in the armed forces, because it allows the U.S. to “lock in” the cooperation of international allies and partners in the long run and thereby reduces Washington’s liability for post-combat peacekeeping and stabilization. To test these and other hypotheses, my dissertation compares U.S. decision making during the lead-up to six post-cold war military interventions characterized by varying degrees of multilateralism. I derive my data from numerous sources. These include about eighty semi-structured interviews with current and former senior U.S. government officials, archival records, personal memoirs, contemporaneous newspaper reports, and the secondary literature.
Other research: Furthermore, I have a strong interest in applied international ethics and classical international relations theory. I am the co-editor (with Nadia Urbinati) and translator of A Cosmopolitanism of Nations: Giuseppe Mazzini’s Writings on Democracy, Nation Building, and International Relations (Princeton, 2009). With Jennifer Welsh, I have edited a collection of essays by leading contemporary scholars on classical thinking about military intervention, tentatively titled Modern Classics on Military Intervention: From Vitoria to Mill (under review). I have also published several articles in peer-reviewed journals, including Ethics & International Affairs, Constellations, Ethnopolitics, and Teoria Politica.
Fellowships: Currently I am a research fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. I have also been a Fulbright Fellow at Harvard, a Humane Studies Fellow, a Rotary World Peace Fellow, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the EU Institute for Security Studies (EUISS) in Paris.
Advisors: Michael Doyle (chair), Richard Betts, Tonya Putnam.
Selected Publications
CV
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