The Department of Political Science congratulates PhD student Andrew Goodhart for being awarded a Peace Scholar Dissertation Fellowship from the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) for their outstanding dissertation on Global Policy. Goodhart’s dissertation is Designing International Orders that Endure: How the Thickness of Social Purpose Affects the Durability of Order. 

Since 1988, the USIP Peace Scholar Dissertation Fellowship program has supported the dissertations of 339 young scholars, many of whom have gone on to distinguished careers in research, scholarship and policymaking. This non-residential fellowship is awarded to PhD students enrolled in U.S. universities who are writing doctoral dissertations on topics broadly related to conflict management, peacebuilding and other related security studies. The award carries a $20,000 stipend and is funded by the Minerva Research Initiative. Read Andrew's bio and a more detailed description of his dissertation below. 

Dissertation Summary

Andy's dissertation is titled “Designing International Orders that Endure: How the Thickness of Social Purpose Affects the Durability of Order." It asks why some powerful countries emphasize the domestic political arrangements of other countries when they seek partners. Some leading countries, like the United States, find it easier to cooperate with similar countries, missing out on opportunities to cooperate with dissimilar ones (e.g., “losing China” during the Cold War), and expending remarkable resources to reform countries that govern themselves differently. He hypothesizes that this attraction toward similar partners is not universal, however, it increases when countries believe they are under threat. This approach produces positive results over the short-term because it enables deeper cooperation with a few countries but, over the long-term, it forecloses opportunities for mutual gain and generates resistance by countries who resent the attention to their internal affairs.

Biography

Andy Goodhart is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Ohio State University, majoring in International Relations and minors in Political Methodology. He is currently a predoctoral fellow with Ohio State’s MESO Lab (Models of Emergent Social Order), which is led by Bear Braumoeller. Andy’s primary research interest is the effect that international orders have on patterns of conflict and cooperation. His dissertation is titled “Justifying the International Order: How Principles of Legitimacy Unite and Divide the International Community," and it focuses on the trade-offs hegemons face when they establish the rules and goals of their order. Relatively more permissive membership rules allow the hegemon to expand its order, but they dilute the consensus needed for cooperation toward shared goals. His mixed methods dissertation uses a unique dataset, case studies and agent-based modeling to investigate how these trade-offs affect global patterns of conflict. Andy’s work is supported by the Charles Koch Foundation and Ohio State University’s MESO lab. Prior to pursuing a PhD, Andy served as a Defense Strategist in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. His 2020 piece (with Jami Taylor) titled “LGBT Military Service Policies in the United States” is forthcoming from Oxford Research Encyclopedia.