What theory is for
I want students who can take a theory into a real case, find where it breaks, and say what should be done instead.
I spent seventeen years working on peace and conflict before I began teaching full time, including three peace negotiations and the victims and transitional justice chapter of Colombia's 2016 accord with the FARC. I watched carefully designed policies produce outcomes nobody in the room intended. That experience gave me the two objectives below.
Two objectives
Every syllabus I write serves these two ends. Everything else is method.
Critical thinking
Crossing theory with real casesI introduce a concept, then hand students a case that strains it. In International Politics we read the standard bargaining account of why wars end, then work through the Colombian negotiation, including the parts that went badly. Students take theory more seriously, not less, when they see a practitioner treat it as something that can fail.
In practice: sequential questioning that starts where every student can answer and ends somewhere they did not expect. Name the trade-off, argue a position, and state the strongest version of the view you reject before attacking it.
Policy orientation
Evaluating policy that is currently in forceI do not teach policy as history. Students work with live material: peace agreement texts, Security Council resolutions, congressional budget justifications, national development plans, and program evaluations. These are the documents I used as a practitioner, and most undergraduates have never been asked to read one closely.
In practice: students take an ongoing policy through the four steps below and finish with a memo they can show someone. Not a grade, a writing sample.
Four steps, one live policy
Students choose something currently in force: security assistance to a partner government, an active peace process, a sanctions regime.
Reconstruct
Establish what the policy is actually designed to do, from the primary documents rather than from press coverage.
Surface assumptions
Identify the causal claims the policy depends on to work. Most are never stated outright.
Evaluate
Test whether those assumptions are holding, using the evidence that exists rather than the evidence one would want.
Propose
Argue for a specific alternative, with its costs and its losers stated honestly.
Three commitments
What the two objectives require of me.
Evidence and methods
Both objectives depend on students handling evidence, so I teach causal inference in R and Stata with real data rather than cleaned extracts. My own USASSA dataset is built for undergraduate research, and several of its questions are still open.
AI as a tool, not an authority
Permitted as a research and search tool: exploring a topic, locating sources, deepening understanding of unfamiliar material, always verified against the originals. Not permitted to generate text, analyses, or arguments for submission. One assignment each term has students check AI output against the primary documents and record where it went wrong.
Mentorship
I taught working students and serving police officers in Colombia for seven years before graduate school, and I was an international student myself. I mentor through the American Political Science Association and treat advising as part of the job, not an addition to it.
Sample syllabi
Full course designs, including the weekly analytical brief questions, the assignment architecture, and the reading selection.
International Politics
Four modules, from rationalist explanations for war through the politics of global order. Weekly analytical briefs, a live policy crisis simulation, and a paired research paper defended in a structured peer-review workshop.
Download PDFInternational Political Economy
Six modules, from trade multilateralism through the domestic politics of monetary policy. The capstone takes a policy currently in force through origins, distributional consequences, global limits, and compensatory mechanisms, then defends it orally.
Download PDFThese are portfolio versions of courses I teach. Institution-specific administrative content, calendar dates, and required policy statements have been removed, and weeks are numbered rather than dated so the design can be read independently of any academic calendar. The course design, assignments, and reading selection are my own.
Courses
Currently teaching · University of St. Thomas
International Politics
Core theories of international relations tested against contemporary cases and ongoing negotiations.
Fall 2026International Political Economy
Trade, finance, development, and aid conditionality, analyzed through official documents and program evaluations.
Fall 2026Latin American Economic Development
How state capacity, violence, and economic policy interact to shape development trajectories across the region.
Fall 2026 · OnlineInstructor of record · Colombia
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Humanitarian Action Universidad Nacional de Colombia · undergraduate and graduate
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Security Policies Escuela de Estudios Superiores de Policía · graduate
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Political Theory and Law Universidad Santo Tomás · undergraduate
Teaching fellow and assistant · UNC-Chapel Hill
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Global Policy Issues Trade, development, migration, security, energy, and climate
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Data Literacy Finding, evaluating, and analyzing data
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Making Public Policy Actors, institutions, and processes of policy formulation