Hiroto Sawada is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in Politics at Princeton University and a graduate fellow at the Program for Quantitative and Analytical Political Science (QAPS). His research interests include the political economy of conflict; the political economy of climate change; international relations/security; formal political theory; and theoretical implications of empirical models (TIEM). His research appears in International Studies Quarterly.

He holds a B.A. in Policy Management (2013) and M.A.s in Media and Governance (2015) and Economics (2016) from Keio University. Prior to Princeton, he worked at the National Institute for Defense Studies (Ministry of Defense, Japan) as a research fellow, where he taught international relations to senior officers of the Self-Defense Forces.

He is on the 2025-26 job market.

Peer-reviewed Journal Article

Hiroto Sawada (2024) “The Mercurial Commitment: Revisiting the Unintended Consequences of Military Humanitarian Intervention and Anti-atrocity Norms.” International Studies Quarterly 68(2): sqae023.

Working Papers

Hiroto Sawada (2025) "Natural Disasters, Asymmetric Exposure, and War: Why Empirical Evidence on Climate Conflict Is Mixed." Job market paper. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4946973.

Gaku Ito, Duc Tran, Hiroto Sawada, Ghulam Dastgir Khan, and Yuichiro Yoshida (2025) "Pain, Attitudes, and (In)action: Divergent Legacies of Herbicidal Warfare in Vietnam." Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5397061.