Why are some emerging technologies more contentious in international politics than others? My book project advances a theory of institutional resilience to explain why technological laggards ever decline to protest harmful innovations, or why innovators ever acquiesce to limitations -- in short, why only some militarily impactful technologies are disruptive to cooperative institutions. I combine findings from randomized experiments, fieldwork in Russia, China, Europe, and the US, and thousands of declassified historical documents from seven government archives to shed empirical light on this question. This research has broad implications for domains of competition in which technology moves quickly and unpredictably -- space, cyber, AI, and more.

Geneva. Fieldwork, November 2018

LBJ Library, December 2018

北航 UAV Institute. Fieldwork, July 2018

UNODA. Fieldwork, November 2018