When Harold Trinkunas joined CISAC in September, it was like coming home again.
Trinkunas will serve in the concomitant role of senior research scholar and associate director for research. One of the nation’s leading Latin America experts, he comes to CISAC from the Brookings Institution, where he was the Charles W. Robinson Chair and senior fellow as well as director of the Latin America Initiative in the Foreign Policy program.
“This is a great opportunity to work in collaborative ways with exceptional scholars around some very important themes in today’s world,” Trinkunas said, noting the urgency of such issues as risks posed emerging technology, the future of the global order, and international security.
CISAC co-directors Amy Zegart and David Relman wrote in their introduction of Trinkunas that his “leadership will continue to advance the center's mission of training the next generation of international security specialists; developing original policy-relevant scholarship; and extending our outreach to global policymakers to improve the peace and security of our world.”
Evolving global realities
Born and raised in Venezuela, Trinkunas earned his doctorate in political science from Stanford University in 1999 and has been a predoctoral fellow and later a visiting professor at CISAC. His first exposure to CISAC took place when he served as a teaching assistant to Scott Sagan in 1992.
Through the years, CISAC has evolved and adjusted its focus to reflect the global security realities, Trinkunas said. “CISAC has successfully adapted to the changing times since its inception.” Research at CISAC spans such topics, including biosecurity and global health, terrorism, cybersecurity, governance, and nuclear risk and cooperation, to name a few.
Trinkunas is looking forward to the mentoring aspect of working with predocs and postdocs while tapping into the CISAC alumni network to open doors for those rising scholars.
“The Center has developed so many positive connections to scholars, policymakers, foundations, and civil society and the private sector more broadly, both in this country and around the word. One of my goals will be to build on those relationships in a way that’s rewarding for all parties,” said Trinkunas, who also served as an associate professor and chair of the National Security Affairs Department at the Naval Postgraduate School.
Security and governance
His newest book, Aspirational Power: Brazil's Long Road to Global Influence, co-authored with David Mares of UC San Digo, was published this summer by Brookings Institution Press.
Trinkunas is especially interested in the intersections of security and governance. In his research, he has examined civil-military relations, ungoverned spaces, terrorist financing, emerging power dynamics, and global governance.
“Latin America is the part of the world that I know most about,” he said, adding that the region particularly stands out due to the decreasing number of wars and conflicts between states over the past few decades, even as problems of criminal violence have become more salient.
Part of the reason for region-wide stability, Trinkunas explained, is that democratization led many elected leaders to de-emphasize the role of military responses to interstate disputes in an effort to reduce the importance of the armed forces in domestic politics.
In a region with a history of military dictatorship, many democratic leaders saw their own armed forces as a more significant threat to their permanence in power than their neighbors’ militaries, he said.
In addition, the U.S. foreign policy toward the region has tended to become less interventionist over time and has focused instead on minimizing the use of force as a solution to interstate disputes in the region. Recent efforts to normalize of the U.S.-Cuba relationship are a reflection of this trend, Trinkunas added.
