Walter Ladwig
I am a Reader (senior Associate Professor) in International Relations at King’s College London. My research examines how states employ military power to pursue political objectives under conditions of strategic constraint. I focus on limited war, coercion, and escalation dynamics, particularly among nuclear-armed rivals and emerging regional powers. Empirically, my work centers on South Asia and the Indo-Pacific, where recurring crises and military modernization expose the risks, constraints, and limits of escalation control.
I am an Associate Fellow with Navigating the Indo-Pacific Programme at the Royal United Services Institute and a Non-Resident Fellow of the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania. I am regularly invited to brief government departments and parliamentary committees on security issues related to South Asia and the Indo-Pacific.
I am the author of The Forgotten Front: Patron-Client Relationships in Counterinsurgency, which develops a principal–agent framework for understanding the political dynamics of security assistance and intervention. My other scholarly work has appeared in leading journals, including International Security, International Studies Quarterly, and the Journal of Strategic Studies.
I earned my Ph.D. in International Relations from Merton College, Oxford where I was the America’s scholar. I also hold a Master in Public Affairs (MPA) from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and dual bachelor’s degrees in Economics and International Relations from the University of Southern California. I have held fellowships at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, the RAND Corporation, and was a Rotary Foundation Ambassadorial Scholar to the Czech Republic.