Pei-Yu Wei's research interests lie at the intersection of international security and economic foreign policy. In particular, she focuses on the design, implementation, and consequences of economic statecraft. She also has a regional interest in East Asia. Before joining Dartmouth, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin. She was also a Pre-Doctoral Fellow with the America in the World Consortium, and a Carnegie Junior Scholar with the International Policy Scholars Consortium and Network. She received her Ph.D. from Duke University's Department of Political Science in 2022, her MA in Politics from New York University, and her Bachelor of Economics and Finance from the University of Hong Kong.
Pei-Yu's dissertation focuses on how third-party actors could affect sanction implementation, design, and effectiveness. Using a combination of statistical methods and game theory models, she highlights how third-party states may levy non-economic costs on the sanctioning state, thereby decreasing the willingness of sanctioning states to impose sanctions or to pursue multilateral sanctions.
During her time at Dartmouth, Pei-Yu plans to work on her book project, "Sanctions Without Intention: The Logic of Non-Enforcement in U.S. Sanctions," which explores the conditions under which Washington strategically chooses to not enforce economic sanctions, either through not following through with sanction threats or via the use of institutionalized tools like sanction waivers. The book aims to achieve three goals: a) typologize and define the types of formal non-enforcement in a way conducive to future scholarly research; b) identify sanction-specific characteristics associated with the different types of formal non-enforcement; and c) provide the strategic reasoning behind the use of formal non-enforcement and the forms that they take.