The Munk School of Global Affairs is pleased to announce the appointment of Darius Ornston as Assistant Professor. Darius received his MA and PhD from the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He joins us from the Department of International Affairs at the University of Georgia and, before that, the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research centres on the political economy of Western Europe, with a special focus on the politics of high-technology competition.

Darius’s first book, When Small States Make Big Leaps (Cornell University Press), examines how Denmark, Finland and Ireland leveraged private-public, industry-labor and inter-firm cooperation to assume surprisingly competitive positions in emerging, high-technology markets. His research on the Nordic model, comparative innovation policy and labor market policy has also appeared in Comparative Political Studies, Governance and West European Politics.

He is currently drafting a second book manuscript, Good Governance Gone Bad, which explains how the same cohesive social networks that underpin successful economic adjustment in Nordic Europe can also lead to policy overshooting and economic crises.

In addition to this work on the politics of constrained geopolitical space, Darius is involved in projects on the politics of research collaboration, the design of “Schumpeterian” developmental agencies, the origins of radical institutional change, the evolution of state intervention in advanced industrialized societies and the relationship between small states and cities.

Darius will begin teaching in the Master of Global Affairs program this fall.