top of page

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.
 

Alexander Lanoszka hq.jpg

Latest Publications

Reclaiming What Is Ours: Elite Continuity and Revanchism

with Maria Snegovaya

European Journal of International Affairs

What explains the revanchism of (post-)imperial states? This question has renewed salience amid Russia’s expanded war against Ukraine in 2022. In this article, we conceptualise revanchism as a foreign policy preference that involves reclaiming territory once controlled. We also advance a new explanation for revanchism that emphasises elite continuity in those states that experience territorial loss. Elite continuity matters because the ruling political class in (post-)imperial states, which was socialised under the old regime, preserves certain beliefs about world politics and the perceived legitimacy of their territorial claims. We show that elite continuity between the Soviet and post-Soviet political leadership in Moscow helps explain Russia’s revanchism better than those alternative explanations that we derive from the International Relations literature. To substantiate our argument, we compile a novel dataset to operationalise elite continuity across regimes and use discursive evidence and other indicators of elite attitudes towards the desirability of reclaiming lost territory. We also discuss the applicability of our theory to other cases.

LATEST NEWS

3234710388_5ca9ea8cd1_b.jpg

NEW EJIS ARTICLE

18 OCTOBER 2024

Maria Snegovaya (CSIS) and I published a new article in the European Journal of International Security that conceptualizes revanchism and explains Russia's revanchism in reference to deep elite continuity despite its post-Soviet communist transition. Open access.

big-ben-7116305_1280.jpg

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.

a-m142-high-mobility-artillery-rocket-system-himars-a7a66c-1600.jpg

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.

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.

91FjQoRobfL._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_.jpg
bottom of page