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About Me

My name is Alexander Lanoszka. I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and in the Balsillie School of International Affairs at the University of Waterloo. I am also an Associate Fellow at the UK-based Council on Geostrategy as well as a Senior Fellow at the Ottawa-based MacDonald-Laurier Institute. I am a co-director of the Réseau d'Analyse Stratégique and a Visiting Professor at the College of Europe, Natolin. I am also director of the Master of Public Service program at Waterloo.

 

I was previously a Lecturer in the Department of International Politics at City, University of London and held postdoctoral fellowships at Dartmouth College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I received my Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University in 2014.

 

My research addresses issues in alliance politics, nuclear strategy, and theories of war, and has appeared in International Security, International Studies Quarterly, International Affairs, and elsewhere. My books include Atomic Assurance: The Alliance Politics of Nuclear Proliferation (Cornell, 2018) and Military Alliances in the Twenty-First Century (Polity, 2022). I have done work on East Asia but Europe is my primary regional focus, with special emphasis on Central and Northeastern Europe. I have two places that I consider home: Windsor-Detroit and Krakow, Poland.

On this website, you will find information about my books, monographs, and published articles as well as information on my academic research, teaching, and commentary.
 

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Latest Publications

Credibility in Crisis: How Patrons Reassure Their Allies

with Lauren Sukin

International Studies Quarterly

How do citizens of US allies assess different reassurance strategies? This article investigates the effects of US reassurance policies on public opinion in allied states. We design and conduct a survey experiment in five Central–Eastern European states—Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Romania—in March 2022. Set against the backdrop of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, this experiment asked respondents to evaluate four types of reassurance strategies, each a critical tool in US crisis response policy: military deployments, diplomatic summitry, economic sanctions, and public reaffirmations of security guarantees. The international security literature typically values capabilities for their deterrence and reassurance benefits, while largely dismissing public reaffirmations as “cheap talk” and economic sanctions as being ineffective. Yet we find preferences for the use of economic sanctions and public statements as reassurance strategies during crises, in part because these approaches help states manage escalation risks.

LATEST NEWS

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CoG WORK

3 OCTOBER 2024

 William Freer and I produced a new Council of Geostrategy report that examines Britain's defence partnerships.​ The link to report is here. I also wrote a new column arguing that Ukraine's Kursk offensive revealed western ambivalence over Ukrainian victory. Read here.

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GLOBSEC REPORT

18 SEPTEMBER 2024

My GLOBSEC report on multi-domain operations and NATO's Eastern Flank is finally available online. You may access it here. In it, I assess how original MDO threat assessments have held up, determine how local allies consider MDO, and what they can do in their defence plans going forward.

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ROK TRANSLATION

13 SEPTEMBER 2024

My Polity book Military Alliances in the Twenty-First Century has been translated into Korean and is now available on the market. 

A link to the translation is here.

What I am reading now

Each time I read a book by Richard Overy I am in awe of how much he knows and how little I know. Though not an easy read at about 900 pages, Blood and Ruins is a magisterial analysis of the Second World War that offers a provocative, yet compelling thesis about it being imperial.

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