Professor Neil Narang – International Security and Conflict Management

Professor Neil Narang’s research interests are primarily in the field of International Relations.  He is currently working on three projects in the area of international security and conflict management and has written papers on each topic. 

His first project investigates humanitarian assistance as a peacebuilding strategy in conflict and post-conflict states.  Professor Narang’s research shows that, contrary to what one may assume, humanitarian aid can have negative ramifications.  Aid can inadvertently prolong civil war when disbursed during conflict and can undermine the peace processes when distributed in the aftermath of civil conflict.  Because humanitarian assistance has become a core component of modern peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction, Narang’s findings will likely have important policy implications.  Professor Narang will further explore the topic this summer as a Research Fellow in residence at the Center for Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding at the Graduate Institute in Geneva.  He will be conducting research at various demining organizations and at the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR).     

In a second project, Professor Narang and a colleague explore how international reputation matters in alliance politics. Although the concept of reputation is central to most theories of international cooperation, there is very little empirical evidence that a state’s past actions (in terms of honoring or violating previous commitments) actually affects its ability to form future agreements.  In a series of papers, Narang demonstrates how reputation matters in subtle and often-overlooked ways for the formation and design of new alliances.  His results suggest that previous research may have underestimated the role of international reputation by focusing too narrowly on the quantity of future agreements while ignoring how reputation affects the quality of agreements over time.

In his third project, Professor Narang and a colleague examine the causes and consequences of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) proliferation.  In their research, they introduce a new dataset of biological and chemical weapons proliferations to determine whether such weapons can be considered a “poor man’s atomic bomb”.  Professor Narang will continue this line of research during the 2013-2014 academic year, when he will be in residence at Stanford University.  

Neil Narang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at UCSB, joining the faculty in 2012.  He also serves as the Director of the Public Policy and Nuclear Threats (PPNT) Program at the University of California Institute for Global Conflict and Cooperation.  Prior to UCSB, Professor Narang was a Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania.