Alexander H Montgomery
Biographic Data
| ID | 128673 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alexander H Montgomery |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alexander H |
| FAMILY NAME | Montgomery |
| SIGNATURE | MONTGOMERY A H |
| AFFILIATIONS | Reed College |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4166-0534 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 508 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 13 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Ceci n’est pas une nuke? The impact of emerging militarised technologies on strategic stability
Breaking Bad? How Survey Experiments Prime Americans for War Crimes
What affects Americans’ sensitivity to international laws and norms on the use of force? A wealth of recent IR literature tackles this question through experimental surveys using fictional scenarios and treatments to explore precisely when Americans would approve of government policies that would violate the laws of war. We test whether such survey experiments may themselves be affecting public sensitivity to these norms—or even Americans’ unders…
Does the Noncombatant Immunity Norm Have Stopping Power? A Debate
Our 2015 survey experiment—reported in the 2017 International Security article “Revisiting Hiroshima in Iran”—asked a representative sample of Americans to choose between continuing a ground invasion of Iran that would kill an estimated 20,000 U.S. soldiers or launching a nuclear attack on an Iranian city that would kill an estimated 100,000 civilians.1 Fifty-six percent of the respondents preferred the nuclear strike. When a different set of sub…
The Stopping Power of Norms: Saturation Bombing, Civilian Immunity, and U.S. Attitudes toward the Laws of War
In “Hiroshima in Iran: What Americans Really Think about Using Nuclear Weapons and Killing Noncombatants,” a pathbreaking survey of attitudes toward the laws of war published in the summer 2017 issue of International Security, Scott Sagan and Benjamin Valentino found that Americans are relatively insensitive to the targeting of civilian populations and to international norms and taboos against the use of nuclear weapons. We replicated a key quest…
Nuclear politics: The strategic causes of proliferation
What Can Political Science Learn from Statistics and Psychology?
This chapter is one of six in this book in which a leading scholar from another field is interviewed about network science. These scholars bring to bear the perspective and experience of their fields, as well as insights about how network science integrates with questions that tend to be of interest to political scientists. They have knowledgeable and unique perspectives on the potential intellectual contributions that political scientists can ma…
Political Networks and Computational Social Science
The last half century has witnessed the digitization of human life, with a sharp inflection point being the widespread adoption of the Internet. In the wake of this digitization the phrase “big data” has been coined. Because many big data are explicitly or implicitly relational, this digitization of humanity has been critical in the increase in the study of networks. Further, since this digitization process continues not only forward but backward…
The Emergence of Organizations and States
Organizations and states emerge, exist, and evolve through dynamic processes operating across multiple network domains (e.g., political, economic, kinship, religion, and war). Autocatalytic networks—sets of nodes that reproduce themselves through ties—create and sustain organizations, but also contain the seeds of their evolution and destruction. Change occurs through novelty, which can take the form of innovation (transposition of ties or feedba…
Democracy and Cooperative Networks
This chapter examines the role of democracy and other characteristics that affect cooperation and conflict in the traditional literature. It assesses the more recent contribution of network analytic studies to the understanding of conflict and cooperation processes. Key contributions of network studies include controlling for network effects on dyadic conflict and cooperation, corroborating some of the key results of non-network studies, and clar…
Discussion Networks
While political network research is often a holistic enterprise, the network paradigm can also be used to study individual behavior. Specifically, rather than focusing on full network structures, a well-established area of research considers individuals’ “core” networks, their perceptions of interpersonal connections, and the consequences of said micro-social environments for myriad political outcomes and processes. This chapter examines this res…
Stochastic Actor Oriented Models for Network Dynamics
Stochastic Actor Oriented Models for Network Dynamics are used for the statistical analysis of longitudinal network data collected as a panel. The probability model defines an unobserved stochastic process of tie changes, where social actors add new ties or drop existing ties in response to the current network structure; the panel observations are snapshots of the resulting changing network. The statistical analysis is based on computer simulatio…
The Oxford Handbook of Political Networks
This volume is a foundational resource on the study of networks in politics. It is grounded in the understanding that networks are omnipresent in the natural and social worlds, and they are at the heart of politics. The 43 essays in this volume offer instruction on network theory and methods at beginning and advanced levels; they also provide an assessment of the state-of-the-discipline on a variety of applied network topics in politics. Leading …
Human Rights and Transnational Advocacy Networks
Human rights advocates have been argued to be working as part of a larger “network” of actors supporting the respect and security of individuals. However, until recently, much scholarship in this area has used “network” as a synonym for “connected actors” instead of examining the network characteristics of advocacy actors and the ways in which the nature of the advocacy network could influence human rights outcomes. This chapter examines the grow…
Arms Supply and Proliferation Networks
Network analyses of global and regional arms flows (including small arms and light weapons, major conventional weapons, and weapons of mass destruction) and related international insecurity and criminality have so far been limited. Yet the literature contains hypotheses that could be explored or tested using network analysis. This chapter discusses supply and demand effects, structural tradeoffs between security and efficiency, pressures to becom…
Terrorism Networks
A recent development in the field of terrorism studies is the growing understanding that analytical frameworks that focus on in-group social processes are highly effective in improving our understanding of the inner dynamics of terrorist groups. Many students of terrorism have begun to challenge some fundamental conventions regarding the way terrorist groups emerge and operate and the relations between members’ roles and profiles. Less attention …
Relational Concepts, Measurement, and Data Collection
Political phenomena are inherently relational, so it is natural that network analysis should come to play an important role in the study of politics. And yet relational data present special practical and methodological problems. The network data scholars would like to collect are often incomplete or altogether inaccessible. It is tempting to take whatever data are available and treat these as a proxy for the desired variables. This chapter review…
Networks and the Politics of the Environment
This chapter surveys recent research that utilizes the measures and techniques of social network analysis (SNA) to explain socioecological outcomes. The chapter focuses on the role of key characteristics of networks—including density and fragmentation, bonding and bridging social capital, brokerage and leadership—in promoting adaptive governance and co-management, and in turn, successful environmental management outcomes. It argues that network s…
Causal Inference in Political Networks
Though scholars have developed an increasingly rich set of research findings regarding the structure of political networks, identifying causal associations between these networks and political outcomes of interest presents a variety of challenges. Addressing these challenges is especially important given the prominence of networks in theories of individual and collective behavior. This chapter uses the framework of the Neyman-Rubin causal model (…
Quantum Mechanisms: Expanding the Boundaries of Power, Space, and Time in Global Security Studies
This inaugural issue of the Journal of Global Security Studies stakes out important new frontiers in security studies, pushing the boundaries of the possible in power politics (Goddard and Nexon), space (Adamson), and time (Ward). Goddard and Nexon attempt to wrest global security studies away from the traditional international relations (IR) perspective of states as primary actors acting within the structure of anarchy; Adamson calls for a “spat…
Explaining the Advocacy Agenda: Insights from the Human Security Network
Through a series of focus groups with human security practitioners, we examined how powerful organizations at the center of advocacy networks select issues for attention. Participants emphasized five sets of factors: entrepreneur attributes, adopter attributes, the broader political context, issue attributes, and intranetwork relations. However, the last two were much more consistently invoked by practitioners in their evaluations of specific can…
War, Trade, and Distrust: Why Trade Agreements Don’t Always Keep the Peace
There is growing evidence that preferential trade agreements (PTAs) provide strong institutional incentives to prevent international conflict among member states, often creating the conditions of trust that can help prevent militarized aggression. We provide an approach to the study of how international institutions influence conflict behavior that considers how PTAs exclude as well as include members and create asymmetrical relationships among m…
Exporting the Bomb: Technology Transfer and the Spread of Nuclear Weapons by Matthew Kroenig
Journal Article Exporting the Bomb: Technology Transfer and the Spread of Nuclear Weapons by Matthew Kroenig Get access Exporting the Bomb: Technology Transfer and the Spread of Nuclear Weaponsby Matthew Kroenig. Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2010. 248pp. Paper, $22.95. Alexander H. Montgomery Alexander H. Montgomery Reed College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Political Science Quarterly, Volume 1…
Centrality in Politics: How Networks Confer Influence
The Perils of Predicting Proliferation
Studies of nuclear proliferation share five serious problems. First, nuclear programs' initiation and completion dates are ambiguous and difficult to code, but findings are rarely subjected to sufficient robustness tests using alternative codings. Second, independent variables overlook important factors such as prestige and bureaucratic power and often use poor proxies for concepts such as the nonproliferation regime. Third, methodologies and dat…
Network Analysis for International Relations
International relations research has regarded networks as a particular mode of organization, distinguished from markets or state hierarchies. In contrast, network analysis permits the investigation and measurement of network structures—emergent properties of persistent patterns of relations among agents that can define, enable, and constrain those agents. Network analysis offers both a toolkit for identifying and measuring the structural properti…
Network Analysis for International Relations
International relations research has regarded networks as a particular mode of organization, distinguished from markets or state hierarchies. In contrast, network analysis permits the investigation and measurement of network structures—emergent properties of persistent patterns of relations among agents that can define, enable, and constrain those agents. Network analysis offers both a toolkit for identifying and measuring the structural properti…
Power Positions: International Organizations, Social Networks, and Conflict
A growing number of international relations scholars argue that intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) promote peace. Existing approach esemphasize IGO membership as an important causal attribute of individual states, much like economic development and regime type. The authors use social network analysis to show that IGO memberships also create a disparate distribution of social power, significantly shaping conflicts between states. Membership pa…
Power or Plenty: How Do International Trade Institutions Affect Economic Sanctions
Does the dramatic rise of the number of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) worldwide make economic sanctions more likely through increasing the leverage of the powerful and pitting states against each other in competition (power) or less likely through increasing the benefits of trade, resolving disputes, and promoting like-minded communities (plenty)? The authors offer the first systematic test of these propositions, testing hypotheses on sanc…
The Perils of Predicting Proliferation
Studies of nuclear proliferation share five serious problems. First, nuclear programs' initiation and completion dates are ambiguous and difficult to code, but findings are rarely subjected to sufficient robustness tests using alternative codings. Second, independent variables overlook important factors such as prestige and bureaucratic power and often use poor proxies for concepts such as the nonproliferation regime. Third, methodologies and dat…
Ringing in Proliferation: How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb Network
The nuclear nonproliferation regime has come under attack from proliferation determinists, who argue that resolute proliferants connected by decentralized networks can be stopped only through the use of aggressive export controls or regime change. Proliferation pragmatists counter that nuclear aspirants are neither as resolved nor as advanced as determinists claim. A technical review of recent proliferators' progress reveals that Iran, North Kore…
Explaining the Advocacy Agenda: Insights from the Human Security Network
Through a series of focus groups with human security practitioners, we examined how powerful organizations at the center of advocacy networks select issues for attention. Participants emphasized five sets of factors: entrepreneur attributes, adopter attributes, the broader political context, issue attributes, and intranetwork relations. However, the last two were much more consistently invoked by practitioners in their evaluations of specific can…
The Stopping Power of Norms: Saturation Bombing, Civilian Immunity, and U.S. Attitudes toward the Laws of War
In “Hiroshima in Iran: What Americans Really Think about Using Nuclear Weapons and Killing Noncombatants,” a pathbreaking survey of attitudes toward the laws of war published in the summer 2017 issue of International Security, Scott Sagan and Benjamin Valentino found that Americans are relatively insensitive to the targeting of civilian populations and to international norms and taboos against the use of nuclear weapons. We replicated a key quest…
Breaking Bad? How Survey Experiments Prime Americans for War Crimes
What affects Americans’ sensitivity to international laws and norms on the use of force? A wealth of recent IR literature tackles this question through experimental surveys using fictional scenarios and treatments to explore precisely when Americans would approve of government policies that would violate the laws of war. We test whether such survey experiments may themselves be affecting public sensitivity to these norms—or even Americans’ unders…
War, Trade, and Distrust: Why Trade Agreements Don’t Always Keep the Peace
There is growing evidence that preferential trade agreements (PTAs) provide strong institutional incentives to prevent international conflict among member states, often creating the conditions of trust that can help prevent militarized aggression. We provide an approach to the study of how international institutions influence conflict behavior that considers how PTAs exclude as well as include members and create asymmetrical relationships among m…
The Hegemon's Purse: No Economic Peace Between Democracies
Cox & Drury broaden the democratic peace literature from the domain of militarized conflict to economic sanctions. Their analysis of economic sanctions data from 1978 through 2000 finds that democracies are more likely to enact sanctions but are less likely to do so against other democracies. In this article, their analysis is extended in three different ways: first, their methodology and sample size are improved; second, interactions between var…
Does the Noncombatant Immunity Norm Have Stopping Power? A Debate
Our 2015 survey experiment—reported in the 2017 International Security article “Revisiting Hiroshima in Iran”—asked a representative sample of Americans to choose between continuing a ground invasion of Iran that would kill an estimated 20,000 U.S. soldiers or launching a nuclear attack on an Iranian city that would kill an estimated 100,000 civilians.1 Fifty-six percent of the respondents preferred the nuclear strike. When a different set of sub…
Quantum Mechanisms: Expanding the Boundaries of Power, Space, and Time in Global Security Studies
This inaugural issue of the Journal of Global Security Studies stakes out important new frontiers in security studies, pushing the boundaries of the possible in power politics (Goddard and Nexon), space (Adamson), and time (Ward). Goddard and Nexon attempt to wrest global security studies away from the traditional international relations (IR) perspective of states as primary actors acting within the structure of anarchy; Adamson calls for a “spat…
Ceci n’est pas une nuke? The impact of emerging militarised technologies on strategic stability
Ringing in Proliferation: How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb Network
The nuclear nonproliferation regime has come under attack from proliferation determinists, who argue that resolute proliferants connected by decentralized networks can be stopped only through the use of aggressive export controls or regime change. Proliferation pragmatists counter that nuclear aspirants are neither as resolved nor as advanced as determinists claim. A technical review of recent proliferators' progress reveals that Iran, North Kore…
Power Positions: International Organizations, Social Networks, and Conflict
A growing number of international relations scholars argue that intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) promote peace. Existing approach esemphasize IGO membership as an important causal attribute of individual states, much like economic development and regime type. The authors use social network analysis to show that IGO memberships also create a disparate distribution of social power, significantly shaping conflicts between states. Membership pa…
Power or Plenty: How Do International Trade Institutions Affect Economic Sanctions
Does the dramatic rise of the number of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) worldwide make economic sanctions more likely through increasing the leverage of the powerful and pitting states against each other in competition (power) or less likely through increasing the benefits of trade, resolving disputes, and promoting like-minded communities (plenty)? The authors offer the first systematic test of these propositions, testing hypotheses on sanc…
The Hegemon's Purse: No Economic Peace Between Democracies
Cox & Drury broaden the democratic peace literature from the domain of militarized conflict to economic sanctions. Their analysis of economic sanctions data from 1978 through 2000 finds that democracies are more likely to enact sanctions but are less likely to do so against other democracies. In this article, their analysis is extended in three different ways: first, their methodology and sample size are improved; second, interactions between var…
The Perils of Predicting Proliferation
Studies of nuclear proliferation share five serious problems. First, nuclear programs' initiation and completion dates are ambiguous and difficult to code, but findings are rarely subjected to sufficient robustness tests using alternative codings. Second, independent variables overlook important factors such as prestige and bureaucratic power and often use poor proxies for concepts such as the nonproliferation regime. Third, methodologies and dat…
Network Analysis for International Relations
International relations research has regarded networks as a particular mode of organization, distinguished from markets or state hierarchies. In contrast, network analysis permits the investigation and measurement of network structures—emergent properties of persistent patterns of relations among agents that can define, enable, and constrain those agents. Network analysis offers both a toolkit for identifying and measuring the structural properti…
Centrality in Politics: How Networks Confer Influence
Exporting the Bomb: Technology Transfer and the Spread of Nuclear Weapons by Matthew Kroenig
Journal Article Exporting the Bomb: Technology Transfer and the Spread of Nuclear Weapons by Matthew Kroenig Get access Exporting the Bomb: Technology Transfer and the Spread of Nuclear Weaponsby Matthew Kroenig. Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2010. 248pp. Paper, $22.95. Alexander H. Montgomery Alexander H. Montgomery Reed College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Political Science Quarterly, Volume 1…
War, Trade, and Distrust: Why Trade Agreements Don’t Always Keep the Peace
There is growing evidence that preferential trade agreements (PTAs) provide strong institutional incentives to prevent international conflict among member states, often creating the conditions of trust that can help prevent militarized aggression. We provide an approach to the study of how international institutions influence conflict behavior that considers how PTAs exclude as well as include members and create asymmetrical relationships among m…
Explaining the Advocacy Agenda: Insights from the Human Security Network
Through a series of focus groups with human security practitioners, we examined how powerful organizations at the center of advocacy networks select issues for attention. Participants emphasized five sets of factors: entrepreneur attributes, adopter attributes, the broader political context, issue attributes, and intranetwork relations. However, the last two were much more consistently invoked by practitioners in their evaluations of specific can…
The Oxford Handbook of Political Networks
This volume is a foundational resource on the study of networks in politics. It is grounded in the understanding that networks are omnipresent in the natural and social worlds, and they are at the heart of politics. The 43 essays in this volume offer instruction on network theory and methods at beginning and advanced levels; they also provide an assessment of the state-of-the-discipline on a variety of applied network topics in politics. Leading …
Human Rights and Transnational Advocacy Networks
Human rights advocates have been argued to be working as part of a larger “network” of actors supporting the respect and security of individuals. However, until recently, much scholarship in this area has used “network” as a synonym for “connected actors” instead of examining the network characteristics of advocacy actors and the ways in which the nature of the advocacy network could influence human rights outcomes. This chapter examines the grow…
Arms Supply and Proliferation Networks
Network analyses of global and regional arms flows (including small arms and light weapons, major conventional weapons, and weapons of mass destruction) and related international insecurity and criminality have so far been limited. Yet the literature contains hypotheses that could be explored or tested using network analysis. This chapter discusses supply and demand effects, structural tradeoffs between security and efficiency, pressures to becom…
Terrorism Networks
A recent development in the field of terrorism studies is the growing understanding that analytical frameworks that focus on in-group social processes are highly effective in improving our understanding of the inner dynamics of terrorist groups. Many students of terrorism have begun to challenge some fundamental conventions regarding the way terrorist groups emerge and operate and the relations between members’ roles and profiles. Less attention …
Relational Concepts, Measurement, and Data Collection
Political phenomena are inherently relational, so it is natural that network analysis should come to play an important role in the study of politics. And yet relational data present special practical and methodological problems. The network data scholars would like to collect are often incomplete or altogether inaccessible. It is tempting to take whatever data are available and treat these as a proxy for the desired variables. This chapter review…
Networks and the Politics of the Environment
This chapter surveys recent research that utilizes the measures and techniques of social network analysis (SNA) to explain socioecological outcomes. The chapter focuses on the role of key characteristics of networks—including density and fragmentation, bonding and bridging social capital, brokerage and leadership—in promoting adaptive governance and co-management, and in turn, successful environmental management outcomes. It argues that network s…
Causal Inference in Political Networks
Though scholars have developed an increasingly rich set of research findings regarding the structure of political networks, identifying causal associations between these networks and political outcomes of interest presents a variety of challenges. Addressing these challenges is especially important given the prominence of networks in theories of individual and collective behavior. This chapter uses the framework of the Neyman-Rubin causal model (…
Quantum Mechanisms: Expanding the Boundaries of Power, Space, and Time in Global Security Studies
This inaugural issue of the Journal of Global Security Studies stakes out important new frontiers in security studies, pushing the boundaries of the possible in power politics (Goddard and Nexon), space (Adamson), and time (Ward). Goddard and Nexon attempt to wrest global security studies away from the traditional international relations (IR) perspective of states as primary actors acting within the structure of anarchy; Adamson calls for a “spat…
What Can Political Science Learn from Statistics and Psychology?
This chapter is one of six in this book in which a leading scholar from another field is interviewed about network science. These scholars bring to bear the perspective and experience of their fields, as well as insights about how network science integrates with questions that tend to be of interest to political scientists. They have knowledgeable and unique perspectives on the potential intellectual contributions that political scientists can ma…
Political Networks and Computational Social Science
The last half century has witnessed the digitization of human life, with a sharp inflection point being the widespread adoption of the Internet. In the wake of this digitization the phrase “big data” has been coined. Because many big data are explicitly or implicitly relational, this digitization of humanity has been critical in the increase in the study of networks. Further, since this digitization process continues not only forward but backward…
The Emergence of Organizations and States
Organizations and states emerge, exist, and evolve through dynamic processes operating across multiple network domains (e.g., political, economic, kinship, religion, and war). Autocatalytic networks—sets of nodes that reproduce themselves through ties—create and sustain organizations, but also contain the seeds of their evolution and destruction. Change occurs through novelty, which can take the form of innovation (transposition of ties or feedba…
Democracy and Cooperative Networks
This chapter examines the role of democracy and other characteristics that affect cooperation and conflict in the traditional literature. It assesses the more recent contribution of network analytic studies to the understanding of conflict and cooperation processes. Key contributions of network studies include controlling for network effects on dyadic conflict and cooperation, corroborating some of the key results of non-network studies, and clar…
Discussion Networks
While political network research is often a holistic enterprise, the network paradigm can also be used to study individual behavior. Specifically, rather than focusing on full network structures, a well-established area of research considers individuals’ “core” networks, their perceptions of interpersonal connections, and the consequences of said micro-social environments for myriad political outcomes and processes. This chapter examines this res…
Stochastic Actor Oriented Models for Network Dynamics
Stochastic Actor Oriented Models for Network Dynamics are used for the statistical analysis of longitudinal network data collected as a panel. The probability model defines an unobserved stochastic process of tie changes, where social actors add new ties or drop existing ties in response to the current network structure; the panel observations are snapshots of the resulting changing network. The statistical analysis is based on computer simulatio…
Nuclear politics: The strategic causes of proliferation
Political science (27 works) · Law (21 works) · Computer Science (16 works) · Politics (16 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Economics (11 works) · Law (11 works) · International Relations and Foreign Policy (10 works) · Political Conflict and Governance (8 works) · Engineering (7 works)