My book project – tentatively titled Power Vacuums in Great Power Politics: The End of Hegemony and Its Aftermath — won the 2024 John McCain Dissertation Award from the Munich Security Conference and received honorable mention for the 2025 Nuno P. Monteiro Best Dissertation Award from the APSA IR Theory Section.

The book answers two questions: what are power vacuums? And how do great powers respond to their emergence? While the concept of ‘power vacuums’ has long featured prominently in both academic and policy debates about IR, scholars of international politics have largely neglected to study power vacuums in a serious social scientific manner.

My book seeks to rectify this omission by providing the first systematic assessment of the nature and role of power vacuums in great power politics. It 1) proposes and defends a conceptualization of power vacuums as instances of international authority collapse; 2) develops and tests a theory of when and how great powers seek to fill power vacuums; and 3) shows how the resulting understanding of power vacuums and their role in international politics helps us better understand not only crucial moments in international history but also current policy issues such as the rise of China and how the United States should navigate the dusk of unipolarity.