Mailing address
Not in Residence
Vipin Narang
Research Fellow, International Security Program/Project on Managing the Atom
Contact:
Email: vnarang@fas.harvard.edu
Experience
Vipin Narang is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Government, Harvard University, where he focuses on nuclear proliferation in regional powers. In particular, his dissertation explores the sources of regional power nuclear postures and their consequent effect on deterring conflict. He has a B.S. and M.S. in chemical engineering from Stanford University and an M.Phil. with Distinction in international relations from Oxford University, where he studied as a Marshall Scholar. He has been a summer research associate at the RAND Corporation as well as the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research in Geneva. His research interests include ballistic missile and nuclear weapons proliferation, South Asian security, quantitative studies of conflict, and general security studies.
2009
Pride and Prejudice and Prithvis: Strategic Weapons Behavior in South Asia
Book Chapter
By Vipin Narang, Research Fellow, International Security Program/Project on Managing the Atom
Vipin Narang's chapter "Pride and Prejudice and Prithvis: Strategic Weapons Behavior in South Asia" in the book Inside Nuclear South Asia was published by Stanford University. Narang examines the ballistic missile flight-testing pattern in the region as a proxy for nuclearization and as an indicator for both states' strategic weapons decisions, attempting to clarify the variables that drive both India and Pakistan to test strategic weapons when they do.
AP Photo
August 13, 2009
"Pakistan's Nukes are Safe. Maybe."
Op-Ed, Foreign Policy
By Vipin Narang, Research Fellow, International Security Program/Project on Managing the Atom
"...[T]he primary risk to the Pakistani Army's ability to safely secure nuclear assets in its custody would likely be during crisis scenarios — either against India or due to a perceived Western threat to the integrity of Pakistan's arsenal — that might cause Pakistan to move to a higher state of nuclear readiness. If the Army feels compelled to rapidly disperse or relocate nuclear components and loses the defensive advantage of protecting them in secure fixed locations, insider foreknowledge of movements and the loss of centralized control could increase the probability of theft or loss...."
Spring 2009
"Who Are These Belligerent Democratizers? Reassessing the Impact of Democratization on War"
Journal Article, International Organization, issue 2, volume 63
By Vipin Narang, Research Fellow, International Security Program/Project on Managing the Atom and Rebecca M. Nelson
In a key finding in the democratic peace literature, Mansfield and Snyder argue that states with weak institutions undergoing incomplete transitions to democracy are more likely to initiate an external war than other types of states. We show that the empirical data do not support this claim. We find a dearth of observations where incomplete democratizers with weak institutions participated in war. Additionally, we find that the statistical relationship between incomplete democratization and war is entirely dependent on the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire prior to World War I. We also find that the case selection in Mansfield and Snyder rarely involved incomplete democratizers with weak institutions. We therefore conclude that the finding that incomplete democratizers with weak institutions are more likely to initiate or participate in war is not supported by the empirical data.
