Robert Brathwaite
Associate Dean for Research and Associate Professor | Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI, UNITED STATES
Robert Brathwaite's teaching and research interests include international security, terrorism and cyberwarfare.
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Biography
Robert Brathwaite is the associate dean for research and an associate professor at James Madison College with a specialization in international relations. Professor Brathwaite is also the faculty director of the James Madison College Human Rights Data Science Lab. He has a Ph.D. and M.A. in political science from the University of Notre Dame.
Professor Brathwaite's teaching and research interests include topics associated with international security, strategic competition with China, terrorism, cyberwarfare, religious violence and the conduct of civil wars. He was awarded a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellowship for Tenured International Relations Scholars from August 2021 – Augst 2022. During his fellowship, he worked at the Department of Defense in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy on China-related issues and is currently a consultant for the Department of Defense, Office for the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs.
He has taught courses that cover the following topics: international relations, international security, cyberwarfare, U.S. Foreign Policy, technology and politics, intra-state violence, and research methods. In his spare time, Professor Brathwaite enjoys the outdoors and is an avid snowboarder.
Industry Expertise (3)
Education/Learning
Computer/Network Security
Defense
Areas of Expertise (5)
Cyberwarfare
International Security
Terrorism
Religioius Violence
Civil Wars
Accomplishments (1)
Council on Foreign Relations Fellowship (professional)
2020
Education (3)
University of Notre Dame: Ph.D., Political Science (International Relations) 2012
University of Notre Dame: M.A., Political Science (International Relations) 2008
UCLA: B.A., Political Science 2006
Links (3)
News (3)
'Constant feeling of being an outsider': The experience of minority humanities professors
The State News online
2022-11-17
International relations professor Robert Brathwaite is Vietnamese and Black. He said this phenomenon happens to students of color as well and can lead to feeling inadequate. He feels like he can't make any mistakes and having a multiracial background can perpetuate the feeling of estrangement from his white counterparts.
Professor Robert Brathwaite Awarded Council on Foreign Relations Fellowship
MSU Today online
2020-12-18
“I want to spend a year working with a federal agency, Congress, or international organization for both my professional development and to further career opportunities for future students who express interest in public service in foreign policy and/or national security,” Professor Brathwaite said.
JMC Human Rights Lab Assists Gasoil Smuggling Investigation
MSU Today online
2020-06-07
Professor Robert Brathwaite, the founding faculty member of the JMC Human Rights Lab, writes: "Working with the JMC Human Rights Lab has been both a professional and personal highlight in my time as a faculty member at James Madison College. In the almost three years of operation of the lab we have grown from a small group of six students to almost twenty students. From a professional perspective, the lab has provided me new opportunities to work with an amazingly talented group of students."
Journal Articles (3)
Deadly Influences: Evaluating the Relationship Between Political Competition and Religious Violence
Political Behavior2023 This study focuses on what is the relationship between religiously motivated violence and political competition? We are interested in understanding how increased levels of political competition can lead to outbreaks of different types of religious violence. We analyze national elections in India, France, and Germany from 2000 to 2015 and utilize a research design that uses natural language processing to examine text sources from English and foreign language media reports to create event-data to test our claims regarding the relationship between political competition and religious violence. Our findings indicate that political competition influences the propensity for religious violence in some of these states but not all and that incorporating foreign language media sources provides significant benefits, especially regarding the occurrence of religious violence that is non-lethal in nature.
Refugees and rivals: The international dynamics of refugee flows
Conflict Management and Peace Science2019 Intra-state violence in Syria, Myanmar, Sudan and other locales has generated an unprecedented level of refugee movement. Although extant scholarship has examined the origins of refugee flows and their implications for political violence, our understanding of why countries receive refugees is less understood. Typically, most explanations focus on the host state’s ability to absorb the economic and security costs that refugees generate. We argue that transnational factors associated with rivalry and alliances, particularly characterizing the relationship between the refugee-producing country and the potential host, impact the type of refugee groups we observe in a destination state. We posit that interstate rivalry and alliance arrangements influence the domestic cost calculus of a host state about receiving refugee groups originating from certain countries. A large-n analysis of refugees for the years 1951–2008 shows strong support for our predictions that a country is likely to receive refugees fleeing its rivals and is reluctant to accept refugees originating from its contiguous allies.
Measurement and Conceptual Approaches to Religious Violence: The Use of Natural Language Processing to Generate Religious Violence Event-Data
Politics and Religion2018 How do we measure religious violence? This study is focused on utilizing new methodological approaches and data sources to measure religiously motivated violence. Previous attempts to measure religious violence concentrated on coding U.S. State Department International Religious Freedom reports or utilizing existing datasets on armed conflict/civil wars. These previous attempts provided state-level data of the levels of religiously motivated violence, but due to data limitations cannot provide more fine-grained measures of specific acts of violence tied to religious motivation. In particular, accounting for varying levels of intensity especially in regards to non-lethal acts of religiously motivated violence is missing. This study builds upon previous attempts focusing on the creation of more fine-grained measures and accounting for its variation at the sub-national level utilizing natural language processing. The data generated are used to examine incidences of reported religious violence in India from 2000 to 2015.
