Visiting Scholar Reports

Strategic Ontologies: Narrative and Meso-Level Theorizing in International Politics

By Ben O’Loughlin and Adam B. Lerner, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

Ben O’Loughlin was a Visiting Scholar at IPDGC in Spring 2023. He presented and recently published his paper titled Strategic Ontologies: Narrative and Meso-Level Theorizing in International Politics, Dr. O’Loughlin offers a new theory of incremental theoretical evolution that connects the practice of international politics with disciplinary IR.

This research paper is available in PDF.

Beyond Soft Power: Analyzing Russian and Chinese Vaccine Diplomacy in the South Caucasus

Cover image of a Visiting Scholar Report: Beyond Soft Power. Images show a map of Armenia and Azerbaijan and photos of vaccine bottles and

By Mariam Gamdlishvili, Georgian Institute of Politics, Policy Paper No. 27, December 2021.

Mariam Gamdlishvili was a Muskie Fellow attached to IPDGC in Summer 2021. Her role at the Institute was to assist with designing a Distinguished Humphrey Fellow program on Media and Disinformation for a group of media professionals from Eastern and Central Europe, Central Asia and Turkey.

Her paper looks at the use of soft power – the abilities of states to influence behavior and attitudes of foreign populations through attraction, rather than through military or economic means (i.e., hard power) – by a number of international actors is not a novel phenomenon and is exercised in various ways targeting societies and countries globally. A PDF of the paper is available.