Academic | Defense Analyst | Alexander Lanoszka

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.

Latest Publications

Alliances, Partnerships, and Alignments: Concepts and Definitions

Security Order and Strategic Alignment in Europe and the Asia-Pacific: Times of Great Power Shifts

This chapter stakes two main claims. The first claim is that scholars should take care to distinguish between alliances, alignments, and partnerships. Grouping all security partnerships together under the label of ‘alliance’ may seem intuitive, but doing so creates various analytical challenges, not least because a different logic is likely to characterize each of those three categories of cooperation. The second claim is that we will continue to see state collaborate with one another across those categories. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, for example, remains the primary vehicle of security cooperation in Europe and has grown in its membership. Still, other, more informal and less robust modes of security cooperation that we can call partnerships are indeed proliferating in Europe and elsewhere. Some states simply have alignments because any enhanced cooperation is too expensive relative to the interests that they have. This chapter develops these arguments

NEW BOOK CHAPTER

24 MARCH 2025

I contributed a book chapter that conceptualizes how 'alliances', 'partnerships', and 'alignments' relate to one another, with discussion on the extent to which each form of security cooperation will be a feature of international relations in the foresseable future. Read more here.

GLOBE & MAIL OP-ED

10 MARCH 2025

Balkan Devlen, Richard Shimooka, and I published an op-ed in Canada's Globe and Mail where we argue that American insularity--rather than Trump's stated annexationist rhetoric--constitutes the real threat to Canadian and allied interests. Read here.

DALADIER ESSAY

5 MARCH 2025

With an eye on current events, I wrote a new piece for the Council on Geostrategy's Britain's World that argues that the real cautionary tale from the 1938 Munich Crisis is not the hubristic appeasement of Neville Chamberlain but the helpless despair of Édouard Daladier. Read here.

What I am reading now

A big book but a magisterial one, Christopher Clark's Revolutionary Spring is an epic history of the 1848 transnational revolution that broke out across Europe is an excellent read.