Working Papers

"Network Effects and the Globalization of Customs Policing"

Job Market Paper

Why do states exchange sensitive law enforcement information with some states but not others? Customs agencies increasingly exchange policing information with their foreign counterparts to govern inbound flows of goods and people before they arrive at territorial borders. Agreements facilitating this exchange of sensitive information have proliferated twenty-fold since 1990, despite the risk that partners could exploit or mishandle shared secrets and potentially reveal sources and methods of criminal intelligence collection. Drawing on elite interviews and insights from network theory, I argue that the social network in which states are embedded reveals valuable information about the reliability of potential partners that ameliorates credibility problems associated with sharing sensitive information. I evaluate this network theory of cooperation by applying an inferential network model to new data on police cooperation between customs agencies (1990 – 2020) and find that two network effects — popularity and shared partners — are significant and substantively important predictors of whether states initiate cooperation on customs enforcement.
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PDF | keywords: police cooperation, collective action, secrecy, counter-terrorism, border control, network analysis
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"A new trade frontier? Customs cooperation & trade-efficient borders" 
​(with Connor Staggs)

Under Review

Amidst growing aversion to traditional trade liberalization tools like preferential trade agreements (PTAs), policymakers can do much to 'free' trade simply by making existing trade more efficient. We provide evidence that one increasingly popular trade facilitation tool — trusted trader agreements — is positively associated with bilateral trade, sometimes surpassing the effects of standard trade liberalization measures like preferential trade agreements (PTAs). Countries that sign trusted trader agreements mutually recognize each other’s exporters certified as compliant with supply chain security standards and agree to subject those trusted traders to less scrutiny at international borders. After estimating a series of gravity models of trade, our findings suggest that the resultant time-saving preferential treatment at borders may indeed increase bilateral trade flows. While we do not offer a causal interpretation of our findings, this paper provides the first empirical exploration of the relationship between a relatively new form of international customs cooperation and international trade, laying the groundwork for future research on the politics of trade facilitation.

Keywords: trade, non-tariff barriers, trade agreements, borders, customs cooperation, gravity model


"Blurring the Line: Transnational Coalitions & the Re-Invention of Border Control"
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Invited submission, ISQ special issue

Border agencies increasingly share sensitive information with their foreign peers to manage inbound flows "upstream" long before they arrive at their territorial borders. This marks a stark departure from prevailing pre-9/11 unilateral and territorial bordering practices. Why have states converged on the same international and intelligence-oriented approach to border control? In contrast to existing functional and power-based explanations that focus on exogenous shocks and U.S. hegemony, this paper shows that, after 9/11, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security strategically orchestrated a transnational coalition of like-minded allies from other countries, international organizations, and the private sector to remake the world’s border agencies in its image. The resulting transnational layer of standards and capacity-building assistance funneled through a handful of international organizations helped the coalition overcome vexing political and technical barriers to diffusing its new policy model. Theoretically, the case illustrates how strategies of contestation between transnational coalitions may destabilize domestic political bargains and drive policy diffusion. 
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Keywords: global governance, policy diffusion, transnational coalitions, social network analysis, international organizations

Works in Progress

"Determinants of U.S. foreign police assistance"
with Lin Pu, data collection in progress

"In Pursuit of Network Power:  Data, Tech Firms, and the New Geopolitics of Border Control"
with Angie Bautista-Chavez and Richie Romero, data collection in progress

“(Un)bundling Sovereignty: Customs and the (trans)formation of the modern state”