Cartland Zhou is a Senior Research and Teaching Associate at the Department of Politics and Public Administration. Cartland’s core research revolves around the theory of constraints that binds the initiation and intensity of modern militarized interstate disputes.

By tracing the evolution of the global arms industry since World War II, Cartland argues that the implementation of just-in-time production processes resulted in the inadvertent development of an arms constraint that limits states from building arsenals that can initiate and sustain intense long-term militarized disputes.

Through a combination of statistical techniques and case studies, Cartland demonstrates that prolonged high-intensity militarized disputes are an artifact of historical conflict behavior that can no longer occur due to the characteristics of the modern global arms industry.

Prior to joining the department, Cartland was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance from 2025 to 2026. She obtained her Ph.D. in Political Science and M.S. in Statistics from the University of California Los Angeles in 2025.