Adam Serwer doesn't break new ground when he argues that "The consistency here lies in the belief that corporations and people have freedom of speech as long as they exercise that right on behalf of right-wing causes." But he does provide the receipts. I think that's...
ess than a year after the appearance of "The False Promise of International Institutions," the journal International Security published replies from Robert Keohane and Lisa...
Over the weekend IR Twitter was abuzz with both the Red Sox winning the world series and a multi-threaded discussion on liberal international order. Regarding the former I have very little to say...
This is a guest post by Dillon Stone Tatum, Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and Geography at Francis Marion University. If the liberal world order isn’t dead, commentators...
Recently a friend and colleague wrote me to say: “The SS piece is actually really useful to me as a model for dealing with Political Science post paradigm wars.” Which prompts me (as if academics ever need such a prompt) to revisit an issue I raised almost a year ago: the role of theory in policymaking. In that long ago post, I mentioned that Patrick James and I had an article under review that addressed the relationship between theory and policy from a fairly novel perspective, and I am happy to say that article—entitled “Theory as Thought: Britain and German Unification”—came...
When I arrived as an incoming graduate student at Ohio State University, I was labeled a realist since I studied extensively under John J. Mearsheimer at the University of Chicago. And despite the fact that I find such labeling exercises rather silly (plus, my advisor at both Chicago and OSU was actually Alex Wendt), there was, and still is, some truth to it. Power does matter in international politics and contrary to many others in our field I think that Mearsheimer’s theory of great power politics does make a lot of sense, and it explains large swaths of international politics throughout...
So it increasingly looks like the inter-Korean Kaesong industrial zone is closed for good. (The Wikipedia write-up is a pretty good quick history of it.) The zone was set-up during the Sunshine Policy period (1998-2007). It was to do 3 things: 1) Lead to some liberal-capitalist spill-over in the North, 2) Expose regular North Koreans (the workers in the area) to regular South Koreans (the managers and staff), and 3) Generally provide some inter-Korean cooperation that might hopefully reduce larger tensions. A resort area in North Korea (Mt. Kumgang) was also opened along these lines in the...
John Quiggin at Crooked Timber
On a plane ride a couple of days ago, I picked up Judith Butler's Frames of War, perhaps a couple of years after I should have. Though there is a lot of the book that I disagreed with, reading it was a transformative experience. It is perhaps particularly relevant to the subject and content of Megan MacKenzie's latest post, given Butler's suggestion that "specific lives cannot be apprehended as injured or lost if they are not first apprehended as living" such that "if certain lives do not qualify as lives or are, from the start, not conceivable as lives within certain epistemological frames,...
At the BISA/ISA panel on pluralism Jennifer Sterling-Folker stressed that realism is not the "dominant paradigm" of North American international-relations scholarship. Instead, she argued, neoliberal institutionalism rules the roost. How do we know this? Among other reasons, neoliberal institutionalists don't spend a lot of time on 'big theory' -- on thinking about the scientific ontology of world politics. They take their worldview for granted, and seek mainly to elaborate and test middle-range (explanatory) theory. It only looks like realism is dominant because realists control one very...