Sarah Burns - Featured Faculty 2024
Sarah Burns
College of Liberal Arts
Sarah Burns examines the theoretical foundations of the American constitutional system and its development. Her research uses Montesquieu’s understanding of the separation of powers to develop a model for salutary institutions.
She demonstrates how the branches have evolved to forgo the struggle created by the Montesquieuan system, allowing the executive branch to assert broad unilaterally powers, instead. She has written on war powers, American foreign policy, democratic peace theory, American imperialism, elections, and Montesquieu’s constitutionalism. In her book The Politics of War Powers, she challenges the concept that presidential overreach has eroded the separation of powers in the realm of warfare. Rather than causing the erosion, presidents have simply responded to the legislative branch’s reluctance to deliberate about military affairs, relying instead on increasingly questionable legal justifications from executive branch lawyers. She currently has a book under contract with co-author Robert Haswell. The Good War: Obama and Afghanistan, takes a deep dive into the decision-making related to the on-going war effort in the South Asian Theatre. In the work, we show how the military strong armed Obama to dramatically increase the military footprint without actually crafting a strategy that could accomplish the broader goals of that war. In a longer book project entitled Losing the Peace, she examines why the US military can successfully prosecute wars but fails to preserve the peace or rebuild nations after military operations have concluded. Besides her academic work, she has published in The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, and The Conversation.
Sarah Burns
Associate Professor
Department of Political Science
College of Liberal Arts