I am a postdoctoral fellow in political science at Charles University, and a visiting fellow at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg. Previously, I was a postdoc at the University of St. Gallen. I hold a PhD from Aarhus University (2022) and Master’s degrees from the Universities of Konstanz and Gothenburg (2018). My research integrates macro- and micro-level perspectives on foreign and security policy, with a particular focus on the control, trade, and use of weapons. This work has been published in the Journal of Peace Research, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, and Political Science Research and Methods, among others (➜ Publications).

In my PhD thesis and several follow-up projects, I examine the determinants of states' positions toward arms control in cross-national quantitative studies. To this end, I have developed two new measures of states' arms control preferences: one that combines UNGA voting records with manual coding of resolutions, and one that uses text-as-data approaches to identify prevalent conflict dimensions in UNGA speeches. My studies demonstrate that states’ preferences cannot be sufficiently explained by interstate relations but require attention to non-state actors and the public.

Therefore, my postdoctoral research (➜ Ongoing Research) shifts the focus to public opinion on foreign and defense policy issues, such as arms exports, drone warfare, foreign interference, and terrorist attacks. My experimental studies in this field show not only that public attitudes closely correspond to—and are shaped by—those of political and military elites, but also that citizens punish parties and governments for acting against their preferences.