Yuleng Zeng successfully defended his dissertation, Economic Interdependence, Power, and Peace: A Rationalist Study of Commercial Liberalism, on March 5, 2020. The dissertation examined three strategic questions originating from states' incentives to exploit adversaries' economic dependence and vulnerability. Using network analysis and game theory, the dissertation identifies and tests different​ scope conditions of trade's pacifying effects. The committee members were Timothy Peterson (chair,  associate professor of political science), Katherine Barbieri (associate professor of political science) , Mark Crescenzi (professor of political science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), Tobias Heinrich (associate professor of political science) , and Kirk Randazzo (professor of political science).