Best Student Paper in International Law, ISA 2024 Annual Conference

This paper examines variation in internationalized territories, or cases in which multiple external actors cooperatively govern a territory in a manner which displaces the indigenous state.  In this paper, I argue that cases of internationalization are byproducts of the state system.  I first provide an original synthesis of cases spanning from the Free City of Cracow (1815-1846) to the 1999 establishment of the UN Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo.  I identify three distinct and historically-specific causal logics of internationalization, which I argue are associated with the transformation from a world of empires to a world of nation-states.  Problems of imperial expansion, imperial collapse, and imperial exit lead to variation in when, where, why, and how disputed territories are internationalized.  These categories are founded upon a historical materialist understanding of the development of the state and its boundaries since the emergence of industrial modernity.  The variation in the causes of internationalization produces variation in the institutional form of these settlements, namely the intended duration of these arrangements and breadth of power claimed by the intervening parties.  My argument is supported by both a medium-n analysis of my complete universe of cases as well as detailed case studies of the Shanghai International Settlement (1868-1943), League of Nations administrations in Danzig and the Saar Basin (1920-1939/35), and the United Nations Transitional Administration in Cambodia (1992-1993).  Uniting these cases under a common definition reveals a previously unstudied form of international cooperation, relevant to the territorially-based crises of today’s international system.

This paper examines the international thought of James Burnham to provide both a genealogy of neoconservatism and a generalizable theory of universalism and pluralism in grand strategy. Burnham, who was a committed Trotskyist before his eventual turn to anticommunism, retained a universalist orientation toward world politics even after his ideological shift. Through his writings in The Partisan Review and later The National Review, he popularized the “rollback” or “liberationist” strategy in the Cold War rather than George Kennan’s more restrained “containment” doctrine.  Focusing on Burnham’s influence, this project traces the intellectual migration of Trotskyist universalism into neoconservative international thought. It identifies the persistent elements of internationalism and democracy promotion that underpinned later American strategies, offers a genealogy of international thought within the American conservative movement, and theorizes alternative configurations of universality and pluralism in grand strategy more broadly. By recovering Burnham’s writings and situating them in their historical and strategic contexts, the paper provides a novel interpretation of the history of U.S. foreign policy and intervenes in contemporary debates about the ideological foundations of America’s global strategy. In doing so, it speaks across subfield and disciplinary divides, engaging audiences in international relations and strategic studies, historical political thought, and American political development.

Why do rival powers sometimes govern contested territories jointly rather than dividing them, conquering them, or supporting their independence? This paper develops a strategic theory of internationalization, a recurring but understudied form of political rule in which multiple external states cooperatively administer a territory through a joint independent agent. I argue that internationalization emerges as a second-best solution to alternative settlements when two conditions converge: the contested territory possesses geographic distinctiveness—strategic, economic, or symbolic value concentrated in ways that resist clean division—and local actors exercise sufficient agency to raise the costs of partition through hedging or territorial binding. Under these conditions, conquest, partition, and supported independence each become unavailable or unacceptable, and rivals institutionalize shared access as a last resort. I test this argument through a comparative analysis of postwar Vienna, postwar Berlin, and Nikita Khrushchev's failed 1960 proposal to internationalize West Berlin. The framework speaks to contemporary proposals to internationalize Crimea, Gaza, and other contested spaces, delimitating the conditions under which such arrangements can hold.