My research explores the relationships between soft power and violence in US foreign policy. I am interested in how the processes of imperialism and decolonization created contradictions between the US’s ostensible universal values–democracy, human rights, and rule of law–and the US’s discriminatory practices as represented by institutions tasked with implementing such supposedly universal principles.
I deconstruct and reinterpret institutional claims of universality as a pretext that obscures US violence, exploitation, and domination as progressive and just. I thus explore the institutions committed to implementing universal values as narrative and aesthetic imperial managers. That the work of such institutions entrenched the post WWII US-led international order is especially notable because of how often their work remains invisible or unquestioned in our historiography. Often, their success was in managing discourse to render their labors innocent.
Book Project
My book project, Make Democracy Safe for Empire: US Democracy Promotion from the Cold War to the 21st Century, explores how the historical violence and exploitation of US imperialism and global capitalism interacts with foundational myths about US democracy and culture and the intellectual and cultural institutions that obfuscate, justify, and facilitate exercises of US power. I analyze what it meant that the US Agency for International Development and National Endowment for Democracy, institutions ostensibly dedicated to promoting democracy, were consistently implicated in violent, undemocratic, and illegal US foreign policy.
I argue that such institutions and their media development, election assistance, and civil society programs served as soft power engines of global cultural and clandestine warfare since the Reagan administration.
Set against the backdrop of the US’s emergence as the unipolar global hegemon from the Cold War to its relative decline in the 21st Century, my project reconstructs the geopolitical power dynamics, transnational networks, and emerging technologies that marked a shift in US imperial strategy. Attention to this shift repositions US democracy promotion institutions as significant cultural producers, deep political players, and neocolonial managers of democratic aspirations.
Broader Relevance
Many of my inquiries into democracy, imperialism, propaganda, and geopolitics resonate with current political events, and the questions that motivate my research are therefore urgent. Who gets to define what democracy is or is not? In what contexts has US soft power, including support for foreign media and civil society, actually undermined democracy and facilitated violence? How have formal and informal transnational networks helped create, maintain, and weaponize myths about US exceptionalism, democracy, and capitalism? The ongoing contests over these questions underpin US foreign relations and the US-led international order.
My work exposes obscured interests and histories behind much of the ongoing global crises in international relations and in democracy itself both at home and abroad.
Refereed Articles
“The Moderate Rebel Industry: Spaces of Western public–private civil society and propaganda warfare in the Syrian civil war.” Media, War and Conflict (Fall 2024)
“Save the Children, Launch the Bombs: Propaganda Agents Behind The White Helmets (2016) Documentary and Media Imperialism in the Syrian Civil War.” The Projector (Summer 2022)
Ben Arthur Thomson 