Kyungwon Suh

Kyungwon Suh is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Technology and International Security at the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC) based in Washington, D.C. He recently received a Ph.D. in political science from Syracuse University. His doctoral dissertation, “Three Papers on Nuclear Operations, Capabilities, and International Conflict,” explores how nuclear operations, defined broadly as the management of nuclear weapons and the implementation of doctrinal concepts by which the military uses nuclear weapons in peacetime and combat, on international conflict outcomes. He received a B.A. in political science from Sungkyunkwan University and an M.A. in political science from Yonsei University.

Kyungwon explores how nuclear weapons influence interstate conflict in three streams of research: 1) the role of nuclear weapons in shaping interstate coercion outcomes, 2) the effect of advances in nuclear weapons technology on military conflict, and 3) the role of nuclear weapons in military alliances. His research projects various empirical approaches, including new quantitative dataset collections, survey experiments, and archival research. His article has appeared in the Journal of Peace Research.

Plans for Fellowship: Kyungwon will mainly work on his book project on the causes and consequences of nuclear signals in interstate crises. Using an original dataset on states’ intra-crisis nuclear signals and archival data, the book project seeks to explain when states engage in nuclear signaling behavior in crises and when nuclear signals contribute to achieving crisis aims.