Political Science

Isabella is a sixth year Ph.D. candidate in political science at Brown University and a pre-doctoral fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Her research lies at the intersection of security studies and political economy through a focus on the politics of global policing. By examining the globalization of border control, her dissertation and related papers contribute to theoretical debates about policy diffusion, international cooperation, and changing configurations of authority in international politics, as well as to policy debates about non-tariff barriers to trade and U.S. national security. She combines a range of quantitative and qualitative methods in her research, including large-N observational studies, network analysis, process tracing, and elite interviews.

Previously, Isabella was a Fulbright recipient and NSEP Boren scholar in Brazil, where she researched transnational organized crime. Isabella received a B.A. in political science with highest honors from Swarthmore College in 2017.

Job Market Paper Title: 

 “Network Effects and the Globalization of Customs Policing"

Job Market Paper Abstract:  

Why do states exchange sensitive law enforcement information with some states but not others? Customs agencies increasingly exchange policing information with their foreign counterparts to govern inbound flows of goods and people before they arrive at territorial borders. Agreements facilitating this exchange of sensitive information have proliferated twenty-fold since 1990, from 37 cumulative agreements in 1990 to nearly 800 as of 2022. This rapid proliferation is puzzling because, although states have a common interest in cooperating against mutual non-state threats, sharing sensitive information is risky. Partners could exploit or mishandle shared secrets by, for example, revealing sources and methods of intelligence collection, providing politicized information and jeopardizing ongoing investigations. Thus, notwithstanding demand for cooperation rooted in the prospect of joint gains, states need assurances that they will not be exploited. Where do states turn for such assurances?

I argue that states look to their social network to assess the reliability of potential partners. Specifically, I hypothesize that two network signals – information deduced from the structure of relationships in which an actor is embedded – reduce the fear of being exploited: the number of friends in common with the potential partner and their relative popularity. I evaluate this network theory of international cooperation with a longitudinal inferential network model (a TERGM) and find evidence of a robust association between the hypothesized network effects and the initiation of customs police cooperation. Once network effects are modeled, I find surprisingly little evidence that the shared threat environment, domestic institutional similarities, or geopolitical affinity drive states to initiate cooperation on customs policing. The quantitative results are bolstered by a set of cross-national interviews with customs practitioners obtained by attending international practitioner forums. Findings show how networks can help endogenously solve collective action problems. In so doing, the paper contributes to a longstanding research agenda on international cooperation and to an emerging body of research that uses network (rather than dyadic) theoretical and methodological approaches to study IR.