Former ISP Fellow Andrea Gilli and Co-author Mauro Gilli Win AWC Article Prize

Former International Security Program Postdoctoral Fellow Andrea Gilli (2017–2018) and his co-author Mauro Gilli have won the America in the World Consortium (AWC) Best Research Article on U.S. Foreign Policy and Grand Strategy for "Why China Has Not Caught Up Yet: Military-Technological Superiority and the Limits of Imitation, Reverse Engineering, and Cyber Espionage," which appeared in International Security (Winter 2018/19).

The article's argument is summarized as:

Contrary to the belief that globalization and the information age make closing the military-technological gap easier, an exponential increase in the complexity of technology has made imitation increasingly difficult. In the second industrial age, Imperial Germany built a big-gun battleship comparable to the British Dreadnought that challenged Britain’s superiority. Today, China struggles to upgrade its jet fighters to rival those of the United States. Imitation no longer saves time or money given massive barriers to entry and ever-increasing technological complexity.

Andrea Gilli is a Senior Researcher at the NATO Defense College in Rome, Italy.  He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation prior to his International Security Program Fellowship. He received his Ph.D. in Social and Political Sciences from Italy's European University Institute.

Mauro Gilli is a Senior Researcher in Military Technology and International Security at the Center for Security Studies of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College and received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Northwestern University.