Leanne’s doctoral thesis aims to better understand how military alliances form and implement strategy, especially in periods of great uncertainty, by examining the process of NATO's adoption of a new strategic concept after the end of the Cold War. Relying on archival material in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and NATO headquarters in Brussels, she challenges prevailing assumptions about the respective roles of headquarters staff and the Alliance’s most powerful members in an effort to shed light on strategy formation in consensus-driven institutions.

I am a DPhil student in Politics at the Department of Politics and International Relations and a member of Nuffield College; I am also a Clarendon Scholar. I work on topics related to political behavior with a focus on corruption, and my dissertation broadly tackles the question of why people simultaneously condemn and engage in corruption.

I am a PhD (DPhil) candidate in International Relations at Balliol College, University of Oxford. My doctoral research explores how emerging technology brings security issues from the national to the individual level, with implications for how public opinion will influence the development, deployment, and regulation of frontier artificial intelligence. My research is generously funded by the University of Oxford's Clarendon Scholarship and Balliol College's Marvin Bower Scholarship.

Yang (韩阳) is a job market DPhil candidate in International Relations and Swire Scholar at St Antony’s College. Her doctoral research explores China's understanding of international hierarchy through its discourses on Africa and China-Africa relations. Yang’s research interests include hierarchies in international relations, critical security studies, and critical IR theory building through the case of China’s international relations.

I am a DPhil student in International Relations, with interests in international organisations, international law, international criminal justice, transitional justice, and international order.

I completed my MPhil in International Relations in 2020; my MPhil thesis examined the processes of judicial and organisational innovation at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). My DPhil project builds on this research.

Jakob is a DPhil candidate researching ethnic civil wars, with a special emphasis on peripheral groups that dispute the state's sovereignty in borderlands. His project maps the interplay of bilateral diplomacy among neighbour states, on the one hand, and rebels' and governments' violent tactics, on the other.

Before beginning his doctorate in 2021, Jakob earned an MPhil (Distinction) in International Relations, also at Oxford, investigating the causal effect of petroleum discoveries on states' strategies in island disputes.