Meet the Director of Undergraduate Programs, Christoph Mikulaschek
Welcome to the Weatherhead Center! Tell us about your role as Director of Undergraduate Student Programs.
During the academic year, I work to avail Harvard undergraduates of the many opportunities the Weatherhead Center offers to them: fellowships; grants for thesis research and for other research and travel; funds for student-run conferences, speaker events, study groups, and student publications; hands-on research experience as research assistants; and participation in student conferences held at West Point, the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, and in Washington, DC. Undergraduates are also warmly welcome to attend any of our twenty open seminar series, and they do not need to have any prior knowledge of or experience with the topic.
My personal highlight so far has been the 2023 Undergraduate Thesis Conference, where the Weatherhead Center’s seventeen Undergraduate Associates presented their amazing thesis research and received feedback—from Harvard faculty, graduate students, and from each other—roughly a month before their theses were due. It was a great opportunity to spark an interdisciplinary conversation on how to approach answering pressing questions on important international topics. I was impressed with the amount of expertise the students had accumulated, their intellectual curiosity and dedication to pursuing cutting-edge research, and their talent for effectively communicating their findings.
What did you do prior to coming to Harvard?
This is my second year on the Harvard faculty. Before coming to Harvard, I completed my PhD in political science at Princeton. Prior to that, I worked as a senior policy analyst at the International Peace Institute, an independent think tank in New York, where I served as principal investigator for a multiyear research project on the United Nations and worked with the UN Secretary-General’s Special Adviser on the Responsibility to Protect. Earlier, I received a master’s degree at Columbia and went to college in Paris and Vienna.
Tell us about your research interests. What are you working on now?
My research interests focus on international security and the political economy of international organizations. In the book manuscript, I investigate how great powers use international organizations to build support for controversial military interventions and costly economic
sanctions.I explain that great powers share disproportionately large influence in international organizations with smaller states to attain unanimity. While power-sharing reduces great powers’ control of an international organization, it benefits them by maximizing the institution’s impact: the unanimous adoption of a policy leads to more cooperation by outside actors and has a larger impact on public opinion than the endorsement of the same policy by a divided organization. To test the argument, I investigate decision-making in the UN Security Council, compliance with its resolutions, its impact on public opinion, and issue-linkage across international institutions.
A second stream of my research focuses on political violence. A set of papers investigates Iraqi public attitudes toward ISIS, the Iraqi government, and US airstrikes against ISIS, leveraging list experiments and two original national surveys. An additional paper estimates the effect of UN Blue Helmets on violence against civilians through design-based causal inference and a case study.
Tell us something that people may not know about you.
I have always been interested in politics ever since I was a teenager, but what sparked my passion for international institutions and security was a summer internship I did as a freshman at the Kosovo Law Center, which had been established by the Organization for Security and Cooperation after the Kosovo war. As an intern in Prishtina, I realized what a crucial role foreign countries and international organizations play during and after war. Sadly, war and security cooperation in Europe are front page news again. I encourage all undergrads to seek out and seize opportunities for amazing summer internships, because they can change your entire professional trajectory.
Image courtesy of Christoph Mikulaschek