Latest Publications
Military Alliances in the Twenty-First Century
Polity
From Polity's website: "Military Alliances in the Twenty-First Century is the first book to explore fully the politics that shape these security arrangements – from their initial formation through the various challenges that test them and, sometimes, lead to their demise. Across six thematic chapters, Alexander Lanoszka challenges conventional wisdom that has dominated our understanding of how military alliances have operated historically and into the present. Although military alliances today may seem uniquely hobbled by their internal difficulties, Lanoszka argues that they are in fact, by their very nature, prone to dysfunction."
"Alliances are a foundational building block of the international order, but academics and practitioners have slighted the study of alliance management. Alexander Lanoszka provides a remedy with a scintillating tour d’horizon of the promise and perils of alliances in the twenty-first century." Eric S. Edelman, Former Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy
About Me
My name is Alexander Lanoszka. I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and in the Balsillie School of International Affairs at the University of Waterloo. I am also the Ernest Bevin Associate Fellow of Euro-Atlantic Geopolitics at the newly created Council on Geostrategy. I am a co-leader of the European NATO subgroup of the Defense and Security Foresight Group and a member of the Réseau d'Analyse Stratégique.
I was previously a Lecturer in the Department of International Politics at City, University of London, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College, and a Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT's Security Studies Program. I completed my doctorate in the Department of Politics at Princeton University in 2014.
My research addresses issues in alliance politics, nuclear strategy, and theories of war, and has appeared in International Security, Security Studies, 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 NEWS
CoG ESSAY
29 MARCH 2022
James Rogers (Council on Geostrategy) and I wrote a short essay that discusses the written down security assurances that the United Kingdom has made with Finland and Sweden as they plan to submit an application to join NATO. You may read the piece here.
CBC INTERVIEW
9 MAY 2022
I spoke on CBC's The Current with Matt Galloway in a program that also involved Canadian foreign minister Mélanie Joly and Maxym Oliferovsky (director of New Hope Center in Zaporizhzhia). I talked about Putin's Victory Day speech and the war in general. Give it a listen here.
NEW BULLETIN ESSAY
15 APRIL 2022
Lauren Sukin (Stanford/LSE) and I are developing a project on reassurance strategies in moments of crisis. We have conducted a survey and a survey experiment in CE Europe in mid-March 2022. We wrote an essay for the Bulletin based on some of our findings.
What I am reading now
My reading of the interwar period continues with Klaus Richter's highly readable book Fragmentation in East Central Europe. It relates the history of Polish-Baltic relations between the First World War and the Great Depression. Well written and insightful, this book is a solid piece of scholarship.
