Fiona S. Cunningham received the 2025 Edgar S. Furniss Book Award for Under the Nuclear Shadow: China’s Information-Age Weapons in International Security (Princeton University Press, 2025). Under the Nuclear Shadow examines China’s distinctive approach to the dilemma of coercing an adversary under the shadow of nuclear war, which relies on substitutes for nuclear threats.
An assistant professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, Cunningham is also a Faculty Fellow at Perry World House and affiliated with the Center for the Study of Contemporary China and the Christopher H. Browne Center for International Politics at the University of Pennsylvania.
Her research lies at the intersection of technology and security, with a focus on China, and has appeared in academic and policy-oriented outlets including International Security, Security Studies, and Lawfare. She has held fellowships at the Renmin University of China, the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University, the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the Political Science Department at Yale University. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in China over the past 12 years.
Cunningham is a research affiliate with the MIT Security Studies Program and holds nonresident affiliations with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and National Security College at the Australian National University.
She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from MIT in 2018. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of New South Wales and a Bachelor of Laws from the University of Sydney, both with first class honors. Previously, she was an Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University.
Book Description
How can states use military force to achieve their political aims without triggering a catastrophic nuclear war? Among the states facing this dilemma of fighting limited wars, only China has given information-age weapons such a prominent role. While other countries have preferred the traditional options of threatening to use nuclear weapons or fielding capabilities for decisive conventional military victories, China has instead chosen to rely on offensive cyber operations, counterspace capabilities, and precision conventional missiles to coerce its adversaries. In Under the Nuclear Shadow, Fiona Cunningham examines this distinctive aspect of China’s post–Cold War deterrence strategy, developing an original theory of “strategic substitution.” When crises with the United States highlighted the inadequacy of China’s existing military capabilities, Cunningham argues, China pursued information-age weapons that promised to rapidly provide credible leverage against adversaries.
Drawing on hundreds of original Chinese-language sources and interviews with security experts in China, Cunningham provides a rare and candid glimpse from Beijing into the information-age technologies that are reshaping how states gain leverage in the twenty-first century. She offers unprecedented insights into the trajectory of China’s military modernization, as she details the strengths and weaknesses of China’s strategic substitution approach. Under the Nuclear Shadow also looks ahead at the uncertain future of China’s strategic substitution approach and briefly explores too how other states might seize upon the promise of emerging technologies to address weaknesses in their own military strategies.
Under the Nuclear Shadow is also the winner of the Peter Katzenstein Book Prize, Cornell University.
Furniss Award
The Edgar S. Furniss Book Award commemorates the founding director of the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at The Ohio State University. The award is conferred on a first book in English that makes an exceptional contribution to the understanding of international, national, and/or human security.
