About

Patricia Sullivan is an assistant professor in the Department of Public Policy and the Curriculum in Peace, War, and Defense at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Davis in 2004, majoring in international relations, comparative politics, and research methodology. In addition to her coursework at UC Davis, she attended the ICPSR Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research at the University of Michigan in 2000 and Columbia University’s Summer Workshop on the Analysis of Military Operations and Strategy (SWAMOS) in 2001. In 2006, she participated in the Philip Merrill Strategic Studies Teachers’ Workshop, sponsored by the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University. She teaches undergraduate courses in international relations including both introductory courses and upper-division classes on IR theory, national security policy, peace studies, and international conflict. She also teaches graduate seminars in security studies and American foreign policy.

Dr. Sullivan’s research explores the utility of military force as a policy instrument, the determinants of war outcomes, and the factors that affect leaders’ decisions to initiate, escalate, or terminate foreign military operations. She has published articles on the determinants of conflict outcomes in the Journal of Conflict Resolution and International Interactions and articles on the duration of major power military interventions in the Journal of Politics and Conflict Management and Peace Science. She has a forthcoming book on the determinants of war outcomes with Oxford Press. Her research, which combines rigorous quantitative and qualitative research methodology, has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, the Office of Naval Research, and the University of Georgia Research Foundation. Dr. Sullivan’s dissertation, which explores why militarily strong states frequently fail to achieve their political objectives when they use military force, received both the 2004-2006 Walter Isard Dissertation Award, given every two years by the Peace Science Society International, and the 2005 Dissertation Award from the Committee on the Analysis of Military Operations and Strategy (CAMOS), a group affiliated with the American Political Science Association.

For more information about Dr. Sullivan’s research, please see her curriculum vitae.