Horace A. Bartilow

Horace A. Bartilow is Professor of International Political Economy in the School of International Service at American University. He is a Jamaican-born social scientist who received his Ph.D. in 1994 from the State University of New York at Albany and received the President’s Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation Award. He was one of only two doctoral candidates to receive this award that year. 

He is a mixed-methods social scientist trained in advanced statistical and qualitative research methods, with particular expertise in documentary and archival analysis and elite and focus group interviewing. He has extensive research expertise in the international political economy of licit and illicit goods. His research on licit economies has focused on the politics of international trade and finance, structural adjustment, economic reform, sustainable development, coercive diplomacy, and economic sanctions. His research on illicit economies has focused on the politics of illicit trafficking and the impact of U.S. drug enforcement on human rights and democratization in the developing world.  

His scholarly articles on these issues have appeared in prominent peer-reviewed professional journals, including Third World Quarterly, Latin American Research Review, International Studies Quarterly, Latin American Politics and Society, International Politics, Foreign Policy Analysis, the National Political Science Review, Journal of Human Trafficking, Enslavement, and Conflict-Related Sexual Violence, and the Social Science Journal. 

Horace is the author of The Debt Dilemma: IMF Negotiations in Jamaica, Grenada, and Guyana (University of Warwick, London: Macmillan Press, 1997), which examines the politics of structural adjustment economic reforms in the Caribbean.  

His latest book is titled: Drug War Pathologies: Embedded Corporatism and U.S. Drug Enforcement in the Americas (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), which examines the U.S. drug enforcement regime’s impact on human rights repression, income inequality, and democratization in Latin America as well as its impact on mass incarceration, race, income inequality, and corporate profits in the United States.  

His recent research examines the political economy of the post-Cold War expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance (NATO) and its consequences for democracy and war. His research in this area has produced two books that are under contract. The first is with Cambridge University Press, titled NATO Expansionism: The Transnational Corporate Security Regime and the Expansion of the Alliance in the Post-Cold War Era, and the second is with SUNY Press, titled Europe’s Demon: NATO’s Expansion, the Rise of the National Security State System, Autocratization, and Declining Respect for Human Rights.