Biography & Scholarship
My research agenda involves using international relations, comparative politics, international political economy, and strategic studies to explore the political, financial, and economic weak points in the international system and measure their impact on global stability. To this end, I have written and co-written two books: Outlaw Paradise: Why Countries Become Tax Havens in 2021 (Lexington Books); and Waging War with Gold: National Security and the Finance Domain Through the Ages in 2023 (Lynne Rienner), co-authored with Robert Farley and Geoffrey Williams. Both books cover topics I believe of increasing relevance in understanding how to maintain state stability in an increasingly contentious and uncertain international system.
My findings in Outlaw Paradise are that countries become tax havens as an economic development strategy in the absence of any other reasonable alternatives, and that they pursue this strategy in the face of organized international disapprobation in part because the anti-tax haven campaigns pursued by the OECD and G20 targeting them are relatively ineffective compared to the foreign direct investment gained by becoming tax havens. The countries that become tax havens tend to be better governed than their peers, and as such are better able to make the various legislative and promotional decisions necessary to become a tax haven, and to grasp the relative inability of IGOs to sanction them in any meaningful way.
My overall argument is that tax havens are weak points in the international system, one that allows state and non-state actors to destabilize their own countries as well as others, as well as the international system the world worked to build in the ashes of the Second World War. Tax havens allow dictators to become kleptocrats, siphoning money from their state coffers until their state collapses. Tax havens allow transnational non-state actors like organized crime syndicates and terrorist groups to get a foothold into the international financial system and to transfer funds from cell to cell. Finally, tax havens allow multinational corporations to avoid paying their fair share of taxes, weakening their countries’ abilities to function and maintain order. My intention is to continue to explore this relationship between tax havens and the international system and state stability over a series of books I intend to write in the next ten to fifteen years.
I am also pursuing my research program in tandem with my co-authors, primarily Robert Farley of the University of Kentucky and Geoffrey Williams of Transylvania University in Waging War with Gold, in which we define finance as a domain of international contestation similar to cyber or seapower. It is our argument that finance not only is currently a domain in which countries contest for hegemony, but in fact has been one for several thousands of years. We illustrate this argument by discussing global history as a series of epochs defined by revolutions in financial affairs from antiquity through the chaos of the medieval period, to mercantilism, the Pax Britannica, the early twentieth century, and finally the period of American hegemony from Bretton Woods to the reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and speculation about what the next fifty years will look like.
In addition, I have recently signed a contract with Lynne Rienner Publishers to write my third book Tax Havens and Kleptocrats: Helping Dictators Steal, Stash, and Squander with an expected publication date of 2028.