Exit Interview is an audio series produced by the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. Co-hosts David Mayorga, associate dean of public affairs and communications, and Ambreen Ali, senior communications and media strategist, speak with graduating students who won prizes for their senior theses, which are the culmination of a year’s worth of research, interviews, and analysis on a policy topic.

Fiona Galvis won the Richard H. Ullman Prize, awarded to the seniors who write the best thesis on a subject with foreign policy implications for the United States, for her thesis about the effectiveness of mechanisms to curb the use of small-scale chemical weapons.

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The transcript below was auto-generated.

Intro: This is Ambreen Ali, and this is David Mayorga. You're listening to Exit Interview, a conversation with Princeton SPIA graduates about their senior year research.

Fiona Galvis: I'm Fiona Galvis. I'm from New York City. I'm majoring in SPIA, and I have certificates in History and the Practice of Diplomacy, European Cultural Studies, and Contemporary European Politics.

David Mayorga: That's so impressive. That's amazing. And you were just telling me earlier that you're headed to Oxford for your master’s this summer, well, in the fall, which is very exciting. That's incredible. So I had the pleasure of reading through your thesis, albeit it was long, but really, really incredible work. And you know, I just, I guess the focus is on the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993. For most lay people, they don't really know what that is or what it's about. So let's start with the basics. Can you tell me a little bit about what your thesis is about in your own words? Think about explaining it to your next-door neighbor.

FG: Yeah, sure. So basically, I wanted to identify what I thought was a crucial problem within the Chemical Weapons Convention, which is the primary disarmament treaty around the use of chemical weapons in warfare, which is illegal. And so I analyzed this one provision of the Convention, which is supposed to be used to identify or target instances of non-compliance. So that is, states that use chemical weapons in warfare. It's called the challenge inspection mechanism. And what is that? It is a mechanism by which any state party -- it's unique to the Chemical Weapons Convention; it's not really duplicated in any other arms control or disarmament treaty globally -- but it's a mechanism by which any state party can call for an inspection of any location on any state party's territory at any time without right of refusal.

DM: So any member of the convention, so any country that's part of the convention, can call and say, I want to inspect X country's facilities, etc, to see if there's any trace or use of, you know, or development of chemical weapons.

FG: So that provision has never been used in the entirety of the treaty's existence. And at the same time, in the past 15 years, we've seen a reemergence of small-scale uses of chemical weapons. So I identified four cases of these that I wanted to look at, which was Syria in 2013, the poisoning of the Skripals in the United Kingdom in 2018, the poisoning of Alexei Navalny in Russia in 2020, and then the current use of chemical weapons on the battlefield in Ukraine. So it's four incidents, really, in the past 15 years, and I wanted to sort of go through each case study, identify why the challenge inspection mechanism hadn't been used in those, what mechanisms have been put into place -- sort of creative, ad hoc workarounds -- and then I wanted to draw conclusions about what I feel this means for the future of the challenge inspection regime and the CWC more broadly.

DM: So let's pause there. Before we get into sort of the, okay, you did all this research, and here's what your observations are, what drew you to this very important topic, however very niche? Was it a particular class that got you excited, or a personal experience, or a professor, or a course?

FG: I wrote my junior paper on U.S. nuclear policy towards Russia in the face of Russia's threat to nuclear use in Ukraine. So I became really interested, more broadly, in weapons of mass destruction through that course. That was my JP (junior paper) Policy Task Force in the fall of 2023, and around the time that I became interested in choosing my thesis topic, which was sort of May of 2024, I saw this one news headline that was not going anywhere else, but it was just one New York Times banner. I don't even know if was the New York Times. It may have been a smaller publication, but it basically said, you know, U.S. issues sanctions on Russia for alleged use of chemical weapons in Ukraine. And I got really interested in this subject, just because I think my primary interest is still in nuclear policy, especially from a U.S. perspective, but this is an issue that no one's talking about. We sort of think of chemical weapons as a relic of the 20th century. We think of, you know, the use of chemical weapons by Germany in World War I. We don't think about the fact that this could possibly be happening today, and I think that we hear so much news about the war in Ukraine, but we don't ever associate it with the use of chemical weapons. So I chose this topic because I wanted to remind people that chemical weapons are still considered weapons of mass destruction. They're still very potent, they're still very dangerous, destructive, and they're not being talked about at all today.

DM: So tell me about it. So as you went through this process, what is it, a year-long process to write a thesis? So you did a lot, I imagine, a lot of library and online research. But did you do any, were there in-person interviews? Were there any moments during this whole years-long process of hard work that surprised you or shifted the way you were thinking about these issues?

FG: I did a large amount of archival research, and then also my primary other source of research was interviews with people primarily over Zoom, over the phone. 

DM: What kind of people?

FG: A large range of people, I would say, like some people who worked for the Biden administration, people who were just sort of experts who had worked on the initial CWC negotiations, people who are scholars in the field whose primary interest is definitely chemicals, technical experts, people who work for the OPCW.

DM: I imagine that you talked to just a whole host of, yeah, really brilliant experts, you know, to draw some of this so, so let's bring it back. So you did all this research. You use these four very salient and timely examples of unfortunate use of chemical weapons or alleged use of chemical weapons in these sort of four theaters. So what did you find? What are some of the conclusions that you drew from your research?

FG: Yeah, so basically, as I went through each of the case studies, I sort of made the argument in each instance why a challenge inspection either wasn't called for, or why it wasn't applicable. And then I sort of get into more detail about the creative workarounds that the OPCW, which is the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. It's a bureaucracy that oversees the CWC. I get into, sort of why they either employed ad hoc mechanisms or, you know, dealt with the issue indirectly. And so basically, the primary conclusion that I come to with each instance is that the challenge inspection mechanism was perhaps not right at the time, because I sort of make three main conclusions, which is that it's sort of too drastic to match the small-scale levels of use. It's technically infeasible, and it would be extremely politically polarizing.

DM: So those are the reasons why this challenge inspection has not been used since the Convention was formed.

FG: Yeah, basically because it requires the burden of one state party to really point the finger at another state party. I argue that in these instances, the punishment sort of doesn't fit the crime. The one instance that I do talk about where a challenge inspection may have been used or could have been used, was the initial attack in Syria. But of course, that is what actually prompted Syria to join the CWC, so they couldn't have used the challenge inspection against that attack in Ghouta, because they weren't a state party to the CWC at the time. But other than that, I sort of argued that the challenge inspection wasn't really merited in these cases. But then the main conclusion from that finding is that if it's never used, it won't ever be used. And the, you know, the political power required to invoke a challenge inspection now is huge.

DM: So darned if you do, darned if you don't.

FG: Yeah, exactly. And it's sort of it's that, you know, the cost-benefit analysis is becoming such that states feel emboldened to get away with small-scale use of chemical weapons, because no one's stepping out and saying, yeah, we're going to use a challenge inspection against you, and perhaps come up with ways for punishing that.

DM: That's very interesting. So obviously, you did all this great research. You're incredibly proud of the final paper of your defense. Obviously you're graduating, so things have gone well, I imagine, and so not just the final paper, but is there something along the way that you're particularly proud of, or that made you excited to be working on this?

FG: My personal motivation for being interested in international security, I feel, is different than I think a lot of sort of the grand strategic political theory intrigue that is taught in a lot of classes. And I think in some ways that has made me interested in security from an academic perspective. But what really motivated this thesis, and why I'm really proud of it, is because I think that it maintains the proper focus on the victims of these attacks. The reason I'm interested in international security is because it's at its core about protecting people and the protection of civilians and their lives. And I think that this issue is not getting talked about enough, not simply from a, you know, it's illegal to use in war perspective, but because real people are being affected by this. And I think that when you're in an academic setting, there's sometimes a risk of losing that perspective, but at the end of the day, I want to make change to prevent these atrocities. And I think that this thesis really helped me solidify that that's what I want to do.

DM: That's an incredible way to put it. And so to close, obviously, there's a number of rising seniors who are going to be embarking on their senior thesis project. I'm sure they're quite nervous about it. What would be a piece of advice that you would give yourself at the start of the thesis process that maybe might have made things a little less stressy or a little less anxiety-inducing or a little more fun. Think of the rising seniors, and what would you tell them?

FG: I think that you really have to pick a topic that you're passionate about, even if you don't know exactly what you want to do. When I started this out, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I thought I wanted to write about biological weapons at first, but leaving your topic open to enough interpretation where you don't really pigeonhole yourself early on, because that way, if you sort of come up with a broad area or focus area that you want to center in on, you can go down all those different paths in October, November, December, when you begin to write in January. But if you sort of close yourself off or marry yourself to one topic really quickly, I think there's a risk that it's not actually what you want to do. So I would say, be open to the different ways that your thesis can go, because sometimes it kind of ends up writing itself, you know, like there's one really strong narrative that comes out, and it may not be the narrative that you envisioned at first. But you should really be open to that, because I think it'll make the writing process a lot more fun and more interesting and challenging.

DM: I think that's a really great piece of advice, not only for thesis writing, but I think for life, remain flexible and open to spontaneity and change. Well, listen, thank you so much for being here with us and chatting about all your great work. Congratulations on graduation and your upcoming master's work. Thanks so much.