About the event: Why do democratic leaders politicize foreign policy bureaucracies? While existing scholarship recognizes that leaders and bureaucrats often clash, it usually attributes these conflicts to organizational pathologies, principal-agent problems, or policy disagreements. This project develops a theory that explains when leaders attack their foreign policy bureaucracies by installing loyalists, marginalizing or purging careerists, and creating parallel agencies, a strategy I call politicization. It argues that leaders tend to politicize instead of bypassing or coordinating with the bureaucracy when two forces come together: when leaders strongly distrust the bureaucracy, fueled by intense partisan, ideological, and social conflicts, and have enough domestic political power to reshape institutions in their own image.

About the speaker: Emily Tallo is the India-U.S. security studies postdoctoral fellow at CISAC. She received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago in August 2025. Emily’s research centers on the domestic politics of foreign policy, focusing on how leaders, bureaucracies, and political parties shape international politics with a regional emphasis on South Asia. Before academia, Emily was a researcher at the Henry L. Stimson Center’s South Asia program in Washington, DC, and an editor of the online magazine South Asian Voices. Her commentary has been featured in Foreign Policy, The Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog, and War on the Rocks.