Academic | Defense Analyst | Alexander Lanoszka

About Me

My name is Alexander Lanoszka. I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and in the Balsillie School of International Affairs at the University of Waterloo. I am fellow at the UK-based Council on Geostrategy as well as the Ottawa-based CDA Institute and the MacDonald-Laurier Institute. I am a co-director of the Réseau d'Analyse Stratégique and a Visiting Professor at the College of Europe, Natolin. I am also director of the Master of Public Service program at Waterloo.

I was previously a Lecturer in the Department of International Politics at City, University of London and held postdoctoral fellowships at Dartmouth College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I received my Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University in 2014.

My research addresses issues in alliance politics, nuclear strategy, and theories of war, and has appeared in International Security, International Studies Quarterly, International Affairs, and elsewhere. My books include Atomic Assurance: The Alliance Politics of Nuclear Proliferation (Cornell, 2018) and Military Alliances in the Twenty-First Century (Polity, 2022). I have done work on East Asia but Europe is my primary regional focus, with special emphasis on Central and Northeastern Europe. I have two places that I consider home: Windsor-Detroit and Kraków, Poland.

On this website, you will find information about my books, monographs, and published articles as well as information on my academic research, teaching, and commentary.

Latest Publications

"A Climate of Fear:

Russian Threat-Making towards Ukraine and NATO, 2022-2024"

with Ruslan Hrabovskyi and Halyna Padalko

European Journal of International Affairs

Russian leaders have engaged in an unusual amount of nuclear rhetoric throughout their attempted full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Drawing primarily from existing data sets assembled separately by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, we find that Russia made 130 threats between 24 February 2022 and 1 July 2024. The standard view of nuclear threat-making is that threats tend to be explicit (at least if they are to be effective), come from the leading decision-maker, and serve to extract discrete policy concessions. By combining lexicon-based sentiment analysis with qualitative analysis, we inductively analyze how Russian nuclear threat-making suggests another possibility. Nuclear threats can be mostly implicit, articulated by many distinct voices with varying degrees of decision-making importance, and may instead serve to raise the temperature and thus stir anxiety among leaders and the publics whom they govern.

NEW CSP ARTICLE

8 NOVEMBER 2026

Delighted to announce a new publication in Contemporary Security Policy with Ruslan Hrabovskyi and Halyna Padalko. This article offers an empirical study of Russia's nuclear threat-making between February 2022 and June 2024. Read more here.

CDAI JEF PODCAST

25 SEPTEMBER 2026

I recently recorded an episode, alongside LGen (Ret'd) Stuart Skeates, for the Conference of Defence Associations Institute to discuss Canada's formal application to join the UK-led Joint Expeditionary Force. You may watch and listen at YouTube.

NEW SHORT ESSAYS

1 JUNE 2026

I have written several short essays. One, published in the Polish magazine Układ Sił, focuses on defence interdependencies in the transatlantic relationship. Another, for RAS, looks forward to Lithuania's upcoming EU Council presidency. Yet another with Richard Shimoka is on the PJBD.

What I am reading now

Królewiec is often treated as a historical black box, albeit one that is associated with Russian naval power and circles on maps that depict purported missile ranges. Nicole Eaton's German Blood, Slavic Soil offers a powerful account of how Königsberg has become Kaliningrad.