Jaganath "Jay" Sankaran

Jaganath “Jay” Sankaran [Juh-guh-nat San-ka-ran] is an assistant professor in the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin and a non-resident fellow in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution. He works on problems at the intersection of international security and science & technology. 

Dr. Sankaran spent the first four years of his career as a defense scientist with the Indian Missile R&D establishment. Dr. Sankaran’s work in weapons design and development led to his interests in missile defenses, space weapons, nuclear weapons, military net assessment, and arms control.

The current focus of his research is the growing strategic and military competition between the major powers. In particular, Dr. Sankaran studies the impact of emerging technological advances on international politics, warfare, and nuclear weapons doctrine. One of his recent publications examines the impact of five technologies—small satellites, hypersonic weapons, machine learning, cyber weapons, and quantum sensing—on nuclear operations, strategic nuclear stability, and international security. His other recent publications have explored a multitude of national security issues, including the lessons for air power emerging from the Russia-Ukraine War, the politics behind the India-China border crises, and the influence of missile defenses on great power nuclear deterrence.

Dr. Sankaran’s first book, “Bombing to Provoke: Rockets, Missiles, and Drones as Instruments of Fear and Coercion,” was published by Oxford University Press. The rapid proliferation and growing sophistication of aerospace weapons—rockets, missiles, and drones—have altered the landscape of warfare. The influence of these weapons on the battlefield is felt profoundly, yet the mechanism of provocation and coercion by which these weapons alter the will of the adversary is poorly understood. The book, drawing from the literature on emotions (fear) in IR, theorizes and determines how states employ aerospace weapons to provoke and coerce their adversaries. The book argues that rockets, missiles, and drones weaponize fear and intimidate and panic an adversary. The fears amplify the political vulnerabilities of the target state. The fears and political vulnerabilities coerce the target state to divert substantial military resources away from other vital missions, consequently damaging the war’s broader strategic aims. 

Dr. Sankaran’s next book project explores the politics and policymaking of socially disruptive emerging technologies, comparatively evaluating American attempts at policymaking and regulation of disruptive technologies—Cloning, Human Genome Project, Genetic Engineering (gene editing recently), Nanotechnology, and Geoengineering—in the presence of several scientific and ethical uncertainties. He is also working on a book project to develop a theory of technology denial that can inform American policy efforts to deny access to emerging state-of-the-art capabilities (particularly in “compute” power) to adversaries.

Dr. Sankaran has held fellowships at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University, and the RAND Corporation. He has held visiting positions at the Congressional Budget Office’s National Security Division, the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies (SAASS) at the U.S. Air University, Tsinghua University, and the National Institute for Defense Studies (Tokyo).

Dr. Sankaran has served on study groups of the National Academies of Sciences (NAS) and the American Physical Society (APS) Panel on Public Affairs examining missile defenses and strategic stability. He has published in International Security, Contemporary Security Policy, Journal of Strategic Studies, Journal of East Asian Studies, Asian Security, Strategic Studies Quarterly, Arms Control Today, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and other outlets. The RAND Corporation and the Stimson Center have also published his research.