Research

I focus on how ideological competition, propaganda, and subversion shape great power politics and contests over international order. Beyond this, I study the global far-right, international hierarchies, and the Cold War. I situate myself within the growing “global power politics” agenda, which studies instruments of statecraft and their evolution over time.

Dissertation/Book Project: “The Propaganda Dilemma”

Propaganda, the distribution of information to audiences to achieve foreign policy outcomes, is commonplace in international politics, but democracies have an especially fraught relationship with it. Why do democracies use propaganda in peacetime in some periods but not others? Drawing on evidence from the Truman, Eisenhower, and Reagan Presidential Libraries and The National Archives in London, I trace the expansion of US and UK propaganda efforts in the interwar, early Cold War, and late Cold War eras after periods of inactivity. I find that democracies embrace propaganda in response to messaging from ideological rivals that threatens their legitimacy among allied and neutral states. Herein lies the dilemma though: even if necessary for national security, propaganda still runs afoul of liberal norms that, while strongest in the interwar, remain salient into the present. I find that democracies resolve the dilemma by reframing their propaganda practices. They employ covert methods, build up private-public networks for indirect distribution, and label their efforts as “information,” “public diplomacy,” or “soft power” initiatives. The latter practice is the most sustainable in the long run, although it has disempowered democracies in modern-day information wars. In the absence of threats, or the presence of scandals which increase elite skepticism, democracies reduce their use of propaganda. The first transhistorical and cross-national study of its kind, I show that America and Britain invested in propaganda to counter the spread of fascism in the 1930s and surges in Soviet disinformation around 1950 and 1980. I present the first account of Thatcher-era covert propaganda using newly declassified material. Extended to the present, I argue that polarization makes democracies unable to reply to enemy disinformation. Divided elites cease to rally against external foes and instead question the bias and efficacy of propaganda institutions.

Peer-Reviewed Publications

  • Casey, Justin S., and Lucas Dolan. “Ideological Topography in World Politics: A Guide to the End of the Unipolar-Homogeneous Moment.” International Studies Quarterly 67, no. 1 (2023): sqad011.

Articles in Progress

  • Why Democracies Use Propaganda: The US and UK in the War of Ideas
  • Call it Propaganda: Rehabilitating the “Good Word Gone Wrong” in International Relations
  • With Friends Like These: The Disadvantages of Total Ideology in Alliance Building
  • Grand Strategy as Grand Challenge: A Pragmatist Roadmap for Achieving Security
  • You Could be Next: Financial Sanctions, Third Parties and Strategic Hedging (with Niccolò Bonifai, Woojeong Jang, and Abraham Newman)
  • Alternate Universalities: Outbidding in Intra-bloc Competition (with Daniel Nexon)

Public-Facing Publications