Christopher Darnton has a PhD from the Department of Politics at Princeton University. At CISAC, Christopher is writing a book on the hundred-year history of U.S. security cooperation in Latin America, using declassified military documents to analyze the day-to-day work of alliance politics from the vantage point of officers in the field. How should we explain and understand military roles in inter-American relations beyond specific cases of intervention, and what lessons should inform US defense cooperation and military diplomacy today? Christopher’s broader work examines the domestic and bureaucratic politics of foreign policy in the Americas, particularly related to enduring rivalries and regional wars; conflict resolution and public diplomacy; developing-country diplomacy in the Cold War and in contemporary great power competition; and the refinement of archival and case-study research methods in security studies.

Christopher is an associate professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, where he has worked since 2016, teaching Latin American politics, international relations, and US foreign policy. Before NPS, Christopher taught for seven years at the Catholic University of America, and before that, for a year at Reed College. Christopher also served as president of the Foreign Policy section of the American Political Science Association; as a contributing editor to the Library of Congress' Handbook of Latin American Studies; and as a summer associate at the RAND Corporation.