Walter Ladwig :: Homepage
Welcome! My name is Walter Ladwig and I am the Americas Scholar at at Merton College, Oxford where I am a doctoral candidate in the Department of Politics and International Relations. During the 2008-2009 academic year I am a pre-doctoral fellow at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. I am also an affiliate of the Insurgency Research Group at Kings College London.
My research interests include international security and foreign policy, defense politics, military strategy and operations, counterinsurgency, and the political and military implications of India’s emergence as great power. My work has appeared or is forthcoming in International Security, Comparative Strategy, Small Wars and Insurgencies, Asian Security, Military Review, Strategic Insights, War in History, and Joint Force Quarterly.
My dissertation, "Assisting Counterinsurgents: U.S. Security Assistance and Internal War, 1946-1991", is a comparative study of U.S. efforts to assist allied nations in counterinsurgency, with a specific focus on how American aid could induce political and economic reform. The central paradox of such efforts is that despite providing overwhelming amounts of aid to its ally, the U.S. was frequently unable to gain sufficient leverage to compel them to address the political and economic root causes of the insurgency. This project identifies the sequencing of aid as the key factor in successfully encouraging needed reform: The provision of assistance must be tightly tied to specific actions on the part of the local government in order to positively alter the client’s behavior. This hypothesis is examined in a series of three historical case studies based primarily on archival sources.
Prior to entering the doctoral program at Oxford, I was a consultant to the Department of Defense in Washington, D.C. I have a Masters in Public Affairs (MPA) from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and dual bachelor degrees in Economics and International Relations from the University of Southern California .