Eleni Ekmektsioglou

Eleni Ekmektsioglou is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Technology and International Security at the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC) based in Washington, D.C. She recently completed her Ph.D. dissertation at American University’s School of International Service. She is a research fellow at the Center for Security, Innovation, and New Technology and an Adjunct Professor at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University. She studies the reasons behind the variation in military organizations’ reactions to emerging technologies. Her dissertation sheds light on the determinants behind military organizations’ assessments and evaluations of emerging technologies. Given the potentially critical impact of new technologies on military effectiveness and systemic power balances, the dissertation argues that we need to understand deeper the determinants behind military organizations’ reactions to emerging technologies including cases such as adaptation, rejection and/or countering.

While a Ph.D. candidate, Eleni completed a predoctoral fellowship at GWU’s Institute for Security and Conflict Studies (ISCS) while she is a member of a number of policy and academic networks such as SWAMOS, Bridging the Gap, and APSIA. Before starting her Ph.D., she worked for the European Union Institute for Security Studies (EUISS) in Paris on a research project that looked at transatlantic cooperation in the Asia Pacific region. Eleni was also a Handa Fellow at Pacific Forum CSIS in Honolulu doing research on China’s nuclear and naval strategy. She holds a master’s degree in international conflicts from the War Studies Department at King’s College London. She is the co-founder of the Emerging Scholars on Emerging Technologies network, and she has published both peer-reviewed articles and opinion pieces in journals such as the Pacific Review, the Strategic Studies Quarterly, the National Interest, and the Diplomat Magazine.

Plans for the fellowship: During the fellowship year, Eleni will work on turning two of her dissertation chapters into stand-alone papers: one historical case study (Italy’s Regia Marina and the aircraft carrier during the Interwar period) and one contemporary case study (China and hypersonic weapons). As side projects, Eleni would like to start gathering evidence on two theoretically important and policy relevant questions: a. the relationship between emerging technologies and alliance interoperability as well as entrapment dynamics and b. the link between ASAT weapons and escalation dynamics in East Asia. Regarding the former question, she will investigate to what extent emerging technologies could impact alliance relations as a result of the requirement of increased interoperability possibly leading to the outcome of entrapment. Regarding the latter question, the link between ASAT weapons, signaling, and escalation dynamics has not been fully explored yet, especially in a regional context like East Asia. Eleni intends to look at some Cold War historical case studies in order for her to squeeze out testable hypotheses and then examine their validity extrapolating them in the East Asian regional context.