Award-Winning Research
In a resounding affirmation of her scholarly impact, Jihyeon Bae was awarded the prestigious 2025 Stuart Scheingold Prize for Outstanding Paper in Public Law for her groundbreaking work, Invocation of Sovereignty Principle and Regime Types.
The paper examines how domestic political institutions shape the rhetoric around the principle of sovereignty. Analyzing United Nations General Debate speeches from 1946 to 2023 using a word-embeddings method, Bae demonstrates how authoritarian states rhetorically construct the meaning of sovereignty to legitimize contentious domestic policies and deflect international criticism. Bae argues that autocracies increasingly frame the sovereignty principle as non-interference and territorial inviolability, as part of Westphalian understanding. This pattern becomes more salient when autocrats face political risks. These divergent rhetorical uses reveal how regime type shapes the evolving interpretation of one of international law’s most fundamental principles.
An Innovative Research Agenda
This award-winning paper is a cornerstone of Bae's broader research agenda, which traces how authoritarian states strategically reinterpret—rather than outright reject—international norms and institutions to sustain their political authority. A related co-authored paper, Liberalism Discourse and Regime Type, extends this analysis to international rhetoric. Together, these research projects trace a consistent pattern that authoritarian states do not reject international institutions outright but reinterpret and repurpose it to sustain their political authority within the global order.
This series of papers on authoritarian rhetoric builds directly upon her broader dissertation on authoritarian international institutions, which explores how authoritarian regimes use international law and organizations to assert legitimacy and manage cooperation. Preliminary dissertation research is published in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations. The article examines how regime composition within International Governmental Organizations (IGOs) influences institutional design, showing that organizations dominated by autocracies prefer weaker forms of dispute settlement mechanisms.
Bae will receive her PhD in June 2026 and has accepted a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Princeton University for the following academic year.