The virtual seminar will be held from 12:30 to 2:00 p.m. (E.T.)
Scholars often assume that states know their future threat environment and that they are able to develop the most appropriate weapon systems in order to respond to it. This, however, overlooks that states are making decisions about their military arsenals years, if not decades before a war is in sight or before these weapons would ever need to be used. This talk will explore the influence of ideas about the future on shaping state’s decisions about military technologies. It will explore in particular the case of the US development of missile defense capabilities from the 1980s until the mid-1990s.
About the speaker: Sanne Verschuren is an Assistant Professor of International Security at Boston University’s Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies. Previously, she was a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow with the Nuclear Knowledges Program at the Center for International Studies at Sciences Po, Paris and a Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. Her research engages questions at the intersection of international security, the domestic determinants of defense policy, and the role of ideas, norms, and institutions in national security decision-making. This talk is based on her PhD thesis from Brown University, which received APSA’s 2022 Kenneth N. Waltz Outstanding Dissertation Award.