Rob Haswell
PhD student
| Degrees: | BA Hons StFX (2018) & MSc,International Relations, University of Edinburgh (2019) |
| Email: | robhaswell@cmail.carleton.ca |
| Twitter: | Follow |
I began the PhD program in September 2020, having previously attended St. Francis Xavier University (2018) and the University of Edinburgh (2019). I am currently a second-year political science PhD student at Carleton University, with concentrations in the fields of international relations and comparative politics. My dissertation will be analyzing how counterinsurgency is framed within American foreign policy and how this framing in turn affects battlespace performance. This dissertation will use the periodic case studies of the Vietnam War (1960-1965), the Iraq War (2003-2008), and the War in Afghanistan (2009-2014), as well as a neoclassical realist theoretical framework. It will be supervised by Dr. Elinor Sloan.
Largely working within international security, my research interests include the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, non-state actors such as the Taliban and the Islamic State and other forms of transnational terrorism, as well as Iranian foreign and defense policy. My past studies have largely dealt with these topics as my master’s dissertation explored the subjects of the Iranian intervention in Syria and the Saudi intervention in Yemen as part of their regional strategies to counter one another vis a vis a neorealist lens, while my undergraduate thesis explored the American invasion of Iraq as the primary cause for the rise of the Islamic State. Outside of international security, I am interested in the theoretical schools of realism and the English School within international relations.
Outside of academia, I enjoy reading even more about the aforementioned subjects, as well as punk rock and coffee.