I am Professor of International Studies and Political Science at the Virginia Military Institute and Board Member of the TransResearch Consortium.  I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Arizona. My research includes understanding the impact of systemic hierarchy, analysis of the causes of international conflict, and theorizing in the subfield of comparative regionalism. A common theme throughout these research programs is the impact of geography in conditioning our understanding of state behavior, including the temporal coexistence of order and disorder across different regions within the international system.