About
John de Bhal is an LSE Fellow in Qualitative Methods in the Department of Methodology. He received his DPhil in International Relations from the University of Oxford in 2024 and was a postdoc at Princeton University before coming to the LSE.
His research examines how actors that we traditionally assume to be marginal in world politics have, in fact, been central to the development of fundamental aspects of modern international order. In his first book, he traces how historically-specific acts of resistance by such actors have had important effects for the design of multilateral international institutions like the League of Nations, the UN Security Council, and the UN Conference on Trade and Development.
He is also increasingly interested in recovering how the British settler-colonies navigated and influenced world politics in the first half of the twentieth century, with an eye to contemporary debates about so-called "middle powers" and international order.
Much of his work is based on archival research. He also has a broad interest in qualitative forms of reasoning in the social sciences especially as they relate to causal and interpretive explanation.
Research
Key expertise: International order, international institutions, archival research.
Book:
John de Bhal. Images of Hierarchy: Resistance and the Making of Modern International Order. Under contract with Columbia University Press, Columbia Studies in International Order and Politics.
Peer reviewed journal articles:
John de Bhal. The middling of international hierarchies. Review of International Studies, First View.
John de Bhal and Alexandra Stafford. The making of ‘Dominion’ status at the 1907 Imperial Conference: dissociation, racialization, and the (re)constitution of international pecking orders. International Studies Quarterly (2025).
John de Bhal. Pride and the Politics of International Defiance: Brazil, the United States, and UN General Assembly Resolution 3379. Third World Quarterly (2025).
John de Bhal. Rethinking ‘middle powers’ as a category of practice: stratification, ambiguity, and power. International Theory (2023)
John de Bhal. Never Thaw that coming! Latin American regional integration and the US–Cuba Thaw. Third World Quarterly (2019)
John de Bhal. More continuity than change? US strategy toward Cuba under Obama and Trump. Contemporary Politics (2018)