DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE

Interests

Research Interest(s): international security, IPE, political networks, strategic secrecy, global policing, borders in international relations

Program Area(s): International Relations

Biography

Isabella Bellezza is a political scientist whose work bridges international security and international political economy. Her research explores policing, political networks, and strategic secrecy in world politics. Her current book project examines how, when, and why border agencies cooperate to police global trade and travel and what that cooperation achieves. The project is based on her dissertation, which won Brown University’s 2025 Joukowsky Family Foundation Outstanding Dissertation Award. Beyond the book, Bellezza’s ongoing projects investigate how political networks impact the distribution of public resources, the promises and pitfalls of disclosing national security intelligence to the public, and the drivers of U.S. foreign police assistance. Previously, she was a Fulbright Scholar, Boren Award recipient, and a pre-doctoral fellow at Brown’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Bellezza received a Ph.D. in Political Science from Brown University and a B.A. in Political Science from Swarthmore College.

To date, Coppock and his colleagues have applied meta-reanalysis to employment audit studies of gender-based discrimination, experiments that measure the effects of party cues on policy preferences, candidate choice experiments, experiments that estimate the effects of religious messages on political attitudes, and experimental investigations of perspective taking.