How democracies talk about war — and why the words matter
Benjamin Yarckin is a PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin who studies war from more than one angle: the military conduct of wars, and how the public and Congress judge them. That includes how wars are fought, how voters evaluate them, and how members of Congress vote on them — and then explain those votes back home.
His work pairs close qualitative research on counterinsurgency, public opinion, and Congressional framing with large-n projects, so the two inform each other. That includes interviews, archival research, and process tracing in Iraq; survey experiments on those same mechanics; and new datasets, including justifications for votes during the war. He approaches the problem of waging war in democracies from several directions at once.
He is on the academic job market and available for public-opinion and foreign-policy consulting.