Brandon Sullivan

Brandon Sullivan is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science, focused on the political economy of private governance and its effect on state power. His current research agenda looks at the political economy of private actors in international security, and the various conditions under which private actors support state-sponsored violence. In the 2023–2024 Academic Year, Brandon was an Inaugural Graduate Student Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. In 2022, Brandon was also a Summer Fellow with the Civic Action Project (CAP), where worked with the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (MassTech) as the Strategic Project Fellow for Technology and Innovation. Brandon has also represented the Wikimedia/Wikipedia community internationally, as a technical stakeholder on majority-world issues during the pre-negotiation phases of the United Nations’ Global Digital Compact (GDC). Brandon earned a Bachelor of Science in International Relations from The University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, and a Master of Arts in International Relations from the McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. In 2023, he was recognized with the Department’s Outstanding Achievement in International Relations award for his capstone project, which explored the management of mis/disinformation and state-firm coordination within cyber regime complexes. To learn more about Sullivan’s research and publications, visit his wepage.

In Spring 2025, Brandon received a CISS Summer mini-grant to further his work on his project which examines how banking and finance professionals in the US respond to geopolitical disruptions in global trade, using survey experiments to assess their support for state intervention under varying risk conditions. By investigating the limits of economic pacifism, the study sheds light on how market actors’ preferences shift during times of uncertainty. Learn more in our featured article.