Professor Erica Lonergan Awarded the 2025 Amos Perlmutter Prize

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Erica Lonergan, an assistant professor of international and public affairs, has been recognized by the Journal of Strategic Studies with the 2025 Amos Perlmutter Prize. The journal, which is dedicated to the study of war and strategy, grants this annual prize to the author of the best essay published by a junior faculty member. The award honors work that challenges understandings of war and diplomacy through theoretical and historical analysis.

Professor Lonergan’s piece, “Minding the gap? The strategic logic of cyber coercion in theory and practice,” investigates the gap between academic and practitioner understandings about the feasibility and utility of coercion in the cyber domain. Academic research has found that coercion in cyberspace faces significant limitations, particularly in light of the role of secrecy and deception in the domain. Yet many US practitioners remain optimistic about leveraging cyber capabilities to carry out coercive strategies and tend to overestimate the coercive potential of adversary uses of offensive cyber power. Lonergan argues that the persistence of this gap holds negative implications for strategy. In particular, if states misestimate the feasibility of their own or their adversaries’ cyber strategies, this could increase the risks of strategic dysfunction or instability between rivals.

To explore these claims, Professor Lonergan conducts a detailed analysis of the causes and consequences of the scholar-practitioner gap. She evaluates competing schools of thought on cyber coercion through an in-depth comparative review of academic literature and policy debates within the US from the mid-2010s through 2024. In doing so, she builds on the growing literature on cyber coercion, and coercive strategies more broadly. Moving beyond debates about the effectiveness of cyber coercion, she offers plausible hypotheses for why states might choose to employ coercive strategies in cyberspace, despite little evidence of their success. Additionally, in studying coercion in the cyber domain, she situates cyber research in conversation with the broader coercion literature. Finally, Lonergan offers practical remedies for bridging the scholar-practitioner gap.

Her work continues to focus on cybersecurity, grand strategy, military affairs, and international security. She has published other articles in the American Political Science Review, Security Studies, and Contemporary Security Policy and publications including Foreign Affairs, War on the Rocks, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, and Lawfare. Her 2023 book, Escalation Dynamics in Cyberspace, was published by Oxford University Press. Her forthcoming book, Open Secrets: Power and Influence in Proxy Alliances, will be published next year by Oxford University Press.

Professor Lonergan has held positions at the US Military Academy at West Point and served as a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Atlantic Council. She was a lead writer of the 2023 US Department of Defense Cyber Strategy and the Cyber Posture Review, and served as Senior Director on the US Cyberspace Solarium Commission, where she developed strategies to defend US cyberspace. She was an International Affairs Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, appointed to JPMorgan Chase and the US Cyber Command at the Cyber National Mission Force. She also served as a member of the Board of Visitors of the US Army War College, and continues to serve as a senior advisor to the Cyberspace Solarium Commission 2.0. She received her PhD in Political Science from Columbia University.