Paul Silva II

I am a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and a non-residential Hans J. Morgenthau Fellow at the University of Notre Dame. For the 2025-2026 academic year, I will serve as a Predoctoral Fellow in the International Security Program at Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. My research and teaching interests encompass economic coercion, alliance politics, and international security. My dissertation identifies when states decide to lift sanctions that have failed to yield concessions from the target state.

The main questions motivating my broader research agenda are: (1) when and why do sanctioning states abandon economic sanctions that have failed; (2) when and how do states acquire, maintain, and influence their allies; and (3) how do states integrate economic coercion into their grand strategies given domestic constraints? I use an array of quantitative and qualitative tools, including original and archival data collection, survey experiments, and advanced statistical methods. Geographically, I concentrate on the Global North, namely the United States and the Europe.

I have received generous financial support from the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS), the Christopher Browne Center for International Politics, and Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship Program (FLAS), among others.

I hold a B.A. Summa Cum Laude in Political Science, two minors in Portuguese and European Union studies, and a certificate in International Relations from the University of Florida. For more information about my research, teaching, data, or service please contact me at pmsilva@sas.upenn.edu.​​