Deborah Boucoyannis

Deborah Boucoyannis is Assistant Professor of Politics, specializing in comparative politics. She also publishes in international relations, especially on the interconnections with political theory and comparative politics. She is currently working on a book manuscript that takes a historical approach to a contemporary question: How do liberal regimes emerge, and what are the preconditions to state building? She focuses on the constitutive role of courts and systems of law, as opposed to geopolitical or economic explanations. The manuscript is based on a dissertation that received the APSA Ernst Haas Best Dissertation Award in European Politics and the Seymour Martin Lipset Best Dissertation Award from the Society for Comparative Research.

In international relations, she has worked on ethnic conflict and the interaction between regime type and causes of war, and on international relations theory. Her paper on liberalism and the balance of power received the divisional nomination for the Franklin L. Burdette Award by APSA and appeared in the December 2007 issue of /Perspectives on Politics/. She is currently completing a paper on the democratic peace, and one on the irrelevance of war in state formation. Her Ph.D. is from the University of Chicago. Prior to coming to Virginia, she was a predoctoral fellow at the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University and a Lecturer in the Committee on Social Studies at Harvard, where she received the Barrington Moore Award for Excellence in Advising.