Research
Overview
I research the political origins of military power. What military capabilities do state possess, why, and so what? Much of the contemporary interest in understanding emerging technologies and the influence of a state’s arms on those of others are fundamentally about understanding how states fight. I address this overarching question through three core themes: military armaments, strategic cooperation, and crisis escalation dynamics.
Publications
Peer-Reviewed and Edited Volumes
Gannon, J Andrés. "Complementarity in Alliances: How strategic compatibility and hierarchy promote efficient cooperation in international security." American Journal of Political Science, (2025): 1-21.
Gannon, J Andrés. “Allies as Armaments: Explaining the specialization of state military capabilities.” Security Studies, 34(1), (2025): 1-31.
Douglass, Rex W., Thomas Leo Scherer, J Andrés Gannon, Erik Gartzke, Jon Lindsay, Shannon Carcelli, Jonathan Wilkenfeld, et al. “Introducing ICBe: an event extraction dataset from narratives about international crises.” Political Science Research and Methods, 12(4), (2024): 729-749.
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Gartzke, Erik A., Jon R. Lindsay, J Andrés Gannon, and Peter Schram. “Gray Zone: Ambiguity and Escalation.” in Elements of Deterrence: Strategy, Technology, and Complexity in Global Politics. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2024), 338–70.
Gannon, J Andrés, Erik A. Gartzke, Jon R. Lindsay, and Peter Schram. “The Shadow of Deterrence: Why capable actors engage in contests short of war.” Journal of Conflict Resolution, 68(2-3), (2024): 230-268.
Gannon, J Andrés. “Planes, Trains, and Armored Mobiles: Introducing a dataset of the global distribution of military capabilities.” International Studies Quarterly, 67(4), (2023): 1-12.
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Gannon, J Andrés and Kerry Chavez. “A Wiki-based Dataset of Military Operations with Novel Strategic Technologies (MONSTr).” International Interactions, 49(4), (2023): 639-668.
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Gannon, J Andrés. “One if by Land, and Two if by Sea: Cross-domain contests and the escalation of international crises.” International Studies Quarterly, 66(4), (2022).
Gannon, J Andrés and Daniel Kent. “Keeping Your Friends Close, but Acquaintances Closer: Why Weakly Allied States Make Committed Coalition Partners.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 65(5), (2021): 889–918.
Gartzke, Erik A., Shannon Carcelli, J Andrés Gannon, and Jiakun Jack Zhang. “Signaling in Foreign Policy.” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Foreign Policy Analysis, ed. Cameron Thies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017)
Book Reviews
Review of A New Strategy for Complex Warfare: Combined Effects in East Asia, by Thomas A. Drohan. 2016 Parameters. 46(4)
Working Projects
Pre-prints
“Polls and Precision Strikes: Electoral origins of high-tech warfighting.” with Kerry Chavez. Under Review
“ICBeLLM: High quality international events data with open source Large Language Models on consumer hardware.” with Rex W. Douglass, Thomas Leo Scherer, and Erik Gartzke. arXiv:2401.10558 [Stat], January 19, 2024. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2401.10558.
“What is Escalation?: Measuring crisis dynamics in international relations with human and LLM generated event data.” with Rex W. Douglass, Erik Gartzke, Jon R. Lindsay, and Thomas Leo Scherer. arXiv:2402.03340 [physics.soc-ph], January 18, 2024. https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03340.
In Preparation
“Ties That Talk: A Text-as-Data Approach to the Strategic Performance of National Security Strategies.” Presentation at Vanderbilt University (April 2025)
“Looking (more closely) at Arms Racing: Qualitative symmetries versus offsets“ with Erik Gartzke Presentation at ISSS (October 2024)
“Forging Conventional Shields with Nuclear Swords: How nuclear allies shape conventional armament decisions.” Presentation at APSA (September 2024)
“That’ll do, MiG: How NATO explains the reconfiguration of former Soviet Bloc militaries.” Presentation at UC San Diego (June 2024)
“Trample with Care: The complexity-fragility dilemma in military technological competitiveness.” with Paul van Hooft Presentation at ISA (March 2024)
“Churning Butter into Guns: Identifying latent military capacity.” with Rex W. Douglass Presentation at APSA (September 2022)
“From Bit to Bite: Measuring latent cyber capacity.” with Nadiya Kostyuk
“Game Changers: Testing diffusion mechanisms of military technologies.” with Andrea Gilli and Mauro Gilli
“N Sides to Each Story: Competing Public Narratives of US Military Operations.” with Kerry Chávez
“The Whole Package: The tailoring of US force structure combinations in modern warfare.” with Kerry Chávez
“Connecting Conflict Data through Wikimedia.” with Rex W. Douglass, Thomas Leo Scherer, and Erik Gartzke