Research

***Winner of the 2023 Peter Katzenstein Book Prize***

***Winner of the 2023 Edgar S. Furniss Book Award***

***Winner of the 2023 APSA Ideas, Knowledge, and Politics Best Book Award***

***Winner of the 2023 ISA International Ethics Section Best Book Award***

***Honorable mention for the 2023 ISA Theory Section Best Book Award***

***Honorable mention for the 2023 Hedley Bull Book Prize from ECPR***

Mass violence, in its varied forms, has long been a primary concern in International Relations (IR)—indeed, most of the discipline’s origin stories of the international system emphasize order emerging from brutal wars or colonial violence. But though scholars frequently analyse the immediate changes mass violence causes in the balance of power or security calculations, far less attention has been paid to its indirect longer-term impacts, particularly as they manifest as collective trauma. This gap is unsurprising, given the difficulties such a complex, historically contingent and non-systematic phenomenon poses for rationalist social science. Yet, uncovering collective trauma’s role in international politics is vital for two key reasons. First, it can help explain longstanding tensions between groups—an especially relevant topic as scholars examine the transnational resurgence of nationalism and populism. Second, it pushes the discipline to more completely account for mass violence’s true long-term costs, particularly as they become embedded in longstanding structural inequalities and injustices. This reckoning is all the more vital as scholars endeavour to decolonize their disciplines and tackle structural racism in the academy. 

This book theorizes collective trauma as a foundational force in international politics—a ‘shock’ to political culture that can constitute new actors and shape decision-making over the long-term. Collective trauma, I argue, not only helps determine the lines between international political groups, but also frames the logics of international political action, leading to meaningful changes that cannot be dismissed as epiphenomenal. The first half of the book theorizes collective trauma and its role in constituting and motivating international political action, while the second turns to three historical cases that uncover the impact of collective trauma in Indian, Israeli and American foreign policymaking. Each contributes to these states’ historiographies, while also demonstrating the broad utility of collective trauma as a theoretical lens for investigating how mass violence’s legacy can resurge and dissipate over time. Recognizing collective trauma’s fundamental role in international political life, I argue, can help usher a ‘trauma turn’ into IR that will make the discipline more sensitive to the substantive long-term impacts of mass violence and suffering.

Edited Volumes

1.     “Trump and Unpredictability in International Relations,” ed. by Bentley, Michelle and Lerner, Adam B., special issue in the Cambridge Review of International Affairs (2021, Vol. 34, no. 3)

--  Republished as A Trump Doctrine? Unpredictability and Foreign Policy (London: Routledge, November 2022) ISBN 13: 9781032364773.

2. “What Matters? The Politics of Narrating War,” ed. by Lerner, Adam B., Miskimmon, Alister, and O’Loughlin, Ben. Special issue in Media, War, and Conflict (2025, Vol. 18, no. 4)

3. “Global After-Maths: From Rupture and Transition to a Politics of Justice,” ed. by Lai, Daniela; Tavares Furtado, Henrique; and Lerner, Adam B. Special issue in Global Studies Quarterly (2026, Vol. 6, no. 2)

1. Lerner, Adam B. and Hayes, Jarrod. “Historical IR and the Promise of Renewed Dialogue between IR and History” Cooperation and Conflict (2026, online first): 1-25. https://doi.org/10.1177/00108367251407452

2. Lerner, Adam B. and Barton Hronešová, Jessie. “Locating Innovation in Norm Entrepreneurship: Bohuslav Ečer, the UN War Crimes Commission, and the Crime of Aggression” Review of International Studies (2026, online first): 1-21. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210526101752

3. Heinrichs, Pauline; Brandimarte, Italo; and Lerner, Adam B. “Climate (In)justice and the Residual Category of Non-Economic Loss and Damage” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 53, no. 3 (2025): 843-867. https://doi.org/10.1177/03058298251366196

4. Hayes, Jarrod and Lerner, Adam B. “Chinese Cinematic Visions: Popular Film, Strategic Ontology, and Foreign Policy in the PRC” Media, War, and Conflict 18, no. 4 (2025): 552-569. https://doi.org/10.1177/17506352251350322

5. Fakhoury, Renato, Lerner, Adam B.; and Hayes, Jarrod. “The Dilemma of Dual Vulnerability in the Pursuit of Climate Justice” Global Studies Quarterly 6, no. 2 (2026): 1-7. https://doi.org/10.1093/isagsq/ksag054  

6. Barton Hronešová, Jessie and Lerner, Adam B. “Bohuslav Ečer, the UN War Crimes Commission, and the Intellectual History of the Nuremberg Charter” Modern Intellectual History 22, no. 4 (2025): 783-808. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244325000010 

7. Lerner, Adam B. and Heinrichs, Pauline. “The Paradox of International Reparations” Review of International Political Economy 32, no. 1 (2025): 126-153. https://doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2024.2399034

8. Lerner Adam B. “Cognitive Entanglement and Individual Responsibility for Structural Injustice” Polity 56, no. 4 (2024): 631-658. https://doi.org/10.1086/732003  

9. Lerner, Adam B. “Global Injustice and the Production of Ontological Insecurity” European Journal of International Relations 30, no. 3 (2023): 595-618. https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661231219087. 

9. • Winner of the 2024 A. Leroy Bennett Award for Best Paper Presented at ISA-Northeast

   • Winner of the 2024 ISA Theory Section Award for Best Post-PhD Paper presented at ISA

10. Lerner, Adam B. and O’Loughlin, Ben. “Strategic Ontologies and Meso-Level Theoretical Innovation in International Politics” International Studies Quarterly, 67, no. 3 (2023): 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqad058.

11. Lerner, Adam B. “Harnessing Intuition and Disciplining Abstraction: Thought Experiments in International Relations” International Studies Quarterly, 67, no. 1 (2023): 1-10. https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqad015.

12.   Lerner, Adam B. “Blurring the Boundaries of War: PTSD in American Foreign Policy Discourse.” Perspectives on Politics, 21, no. 2 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592720004223.

16. • Winner of the 2024 Heinz I. Eulau Award from the American Political Science Association for best article in Perspectives on Politics 

13.   Lerner, Adam B. “Pathological Nationalism? The Legacy of Crowd Psychology in International Theory.” International Affairs, 38, no. 3 (2022): 995-1012. https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiac020.

14. Lerner, Adam B. “Theorizing Unpredictability in International Politics: A New Approach to Trump and the Trump Doctrine.” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 34, no. 3 (2021): 360–82. https://doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2020.1842329.

14. • Republished as “Unpredictability in International Politics: Risk, Uncertainty, and Complexity,” the lead article of the inaugural issue of Political Epistemology, the journal of APSA’s Ideas, Knowledge, and Politics Section

15. Lerner, Adam B. “Social Science and the Problem of Interpretation: A Pragmatic Dual(ist) Approach.” Critical Review 32, no. 1–3 (2020): 124–44. https://doi.org/10.1080/08913811.2020.1840856.

16. Lerner, Adam B. “What’s It like to Be a State? An Argument for State Consciousness.” International Theory 13, no. 2 (2021): 260–86. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752971919000277.

16. • Subject of a symposium in The Duck of Minerva (February 2022), https://www.duckofminerva.com/category/symposia/conscious-states

17. Lerner, Adam B. “The Uses and Abuses of Victimhood Nationalism in International Politics.” European Journal of International Relations 26, no. 1 (2020): 62–87. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066119850249. 

17. • Winner of the 2018 Northedge Prize from Millennium: Journal of International Studies

18. Lerner, Adam B. “Theorizing Collective Trauma in International Political Economy.” International Studies Review 21, no. 4 (December 1, 2019): 549–71. https://doi.org/10.1093/isr/viy044.

19. Lerner, Adam B. “Collective Trauma and the Evolution of Nehru’s Worldview: Uncovering the Roots of Nehruvian Non-Alignment.” International History Review 41, no. 6 (November 2, 2019): 1276–1300. https://doi.org/10.1080/07075332.2018.1473276. 

20. Lerner, Adam B. “Political Neo-Malthusianism and the Progression of India’s Green Revolution.” Journal of Contemporary Asia 48, no. 3 (May 27, 2018): 485–507. https://doi.org/10.1080/00472336.2017.1422187.

21.  Lerner, Adam B. “Manufactured Silence: Political Economy and Management Of The Bhopal Disaster.” Economic and Political Weekly 52, no. 30 (July 29, 2017): 57-65. https://www.epw.in/journal/2017/30/special-articles/manufactured-silence.html.