Status
Assistant Professor and Associate Chair for Research; Co-Director, Center for Contemporary Conflict
Contact
ctwomey@nps.edu
Research Interests
Theories of international relations and security studies; Strategic culture; Perception; Military innovation; East Asian security; Chinese foreign and military policy; Chinese political and social development |
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Biography
Christopher P. Twomey joined the faculty of the Department of National Security Affairs as an Assistant Professor in November 2004. In September 2007 he was named Co-Director of the Center for Contemporary Conflict and Associate Chair for Research in the department.
He previously spent two years as an Adjunct Assistant Professor and Instructor in the Political Science Department at Boston College (2003-04). He received his Ph.D. in Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He earned a Master's degree from the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) in 1993. He received his B.A. from UCSD in Economics in 1990.
His research interests center on security studies, Chinese foreign policy, strategic culture, statecraft, and East Asian security in theory and practice. He has authored several book chapters, published in such journals as Security Studies and Issues and Studies, and co-edited Power and Prosperity: The Links between Economics and Security in Asia-Pacific (1996). His current work focuses primarily on completing revisions for a book manuscript entitled The Military Lens: Doctrinal Differences, Misperception, and Deterrence Failure in International Relations. It explains how differing military doctrines make diplomatic signaling, interpretations of those signals, and assessments of the balance of power more difficult. It then tests this explanation through examination of several deterrent attempts between China and the United States in the early Cold War and shorter cases drawn from outside that dyad.
Additionally, Twomey is managing a track-two diplomatic project on Sino-American strategic nuclear issues. He is also working on a major academic research endeavor working to enhance the analytic rigor of the study of strategic culture. Outside of NPS, he is a member of a multinational research team organized by the Stimson Center examining the relationship between the U.S.-Japan Alliance and China. He is also a member of the Sino-American Security Dialogue, an annual conference bringing together security scholars from the two countries.
Professor Twomey has spent three summers working as a consultant for the RAND Corporation on strategic issues and one year as Policy Researcher for Asia at the University of California's Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. He has also held fellowships from or been affiliated with Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, MIT’s Security Studies Program and Center for International Studies, the National Security Education Program (Washington, DC), and the Chinese Academy of Social Science in Beijing.
During the Afghan and Iraq Wars, he served as a military affairs expert on a local television network affiliate in Boston, and has published in selective mass media outlets. He has lived in China several times, most recently in 1998-99, speaks and reads Chinese, and has traveled widely in Asia.
Among his recent articles and book chapters are: “America’s Bismarkian Asia Policy,” (with Eric Heginbotham) Current History 104, no. 683 (September 2005): 243-250; “Japan, a 'Circumscribed Balancer': Building on Defensive Realism to Make Predictions about East Asian Security," Security Studies 9, no. 4 (Summer 2000); “The McNamara Line and the Turning Point for Civilian Scientist-Advisors in Defence Policy," Minerva 37, no. 3 (Autumn 1999) pp. 235-58; "The Eagle Eyes the Pacific: American Foreign Policy Options in East Asia after the Cold War" (with Richard Samuels), in Patrick Cronin and Michael Green, eds., The U.S.-Japan Alliance: Past, Present, and Future, New York: Council on Foreign Relations (1999).
Additional information about his research and teaching can be found on his web page by clicking here.
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