Caleb Pomeroy

Caleb Pomeroy is a 2022-23 Rosenwald Fellow in US Foreign Policy and International Security at Dartmouth's Dickey Center. He studies the psychology of power in international relations, the effects of state power on human cognition, perception, and behavior. Power is a relative material attribute, but so too power is a feeling and experience that changes individuals, a point lost on IR to date. The cornerstone of the agenda shows that the feeling of power begets paranoia. Stronger states paradoxically feel less secure and, perhaps more perniciously, feel an irrational capacity to solve those imagined fears through aggression.
 
More broadly, he studies the psychology of international security, the psychological determinants of safety and aggression in an intergroup world. In this vein, a current set of papers pushes morality beyond its liberal and enlightened conceptions to show that morality also fundamentally fuels threats and violence in ways missed in security studies research. This work is published or forthcoming in International Organization and International Studies Quarterly, among other outlets. Prior to Dartmouth, he received a PhD in Political Science from The Ohio State University, an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from the University of Oxford, an MSc in Security Studies from University College London, and a BA in Economics from Boston College. He was a US-Asia Grand Strategy Predoctoral Fellow at the University of Southern California during the 2021-22 academic year.