Welcome!

My name is Max Plithides. I am currently a Harry Bloomfield Postdoctoral Scholar and Challenges of Democracy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Tel Aviv University. I received my Ph.D. in Political Science at UCLA in 2025, and from 2024–25, I was a predoctoral fellow at the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at UC San Diego.

My research lies at the intersection of international security, political economy, and war studies. My book project, A Political Economy of War, develops a new formal framework that reconceptualizes warfighting as a process of production. Just as economies combine land, labor, and capital to produce goods and services, military power is produced through combinations of soldiers and equipment. I show that states shape their force structures around their economic strengths and pursue strategies during wartime that reflect relative factor endowments.

My work has appeared in Research & Politics with additional projects conditionally accepted at International Interactions and accepted in the abstract at Political Psychology. I have also served as an Editorial Assistant for International Studies Quarterly and written policy commentary for outlets including The Diplomat and Global Politics at a Glance.