Earlier this week, professional opinion-haver Tom Nichols posted a "short" Twitter thread complaining that the push to make IR a social science, combined with the dominance of realism, is leading to bad takes on Ukraine. Despite my mindfulness-inspired efforts to...
The debacle over the Congressional Progressive Caucus’ letter on Ukraine reflects the underlying tensions between progressive values and realist grand strategies of restraint—as well as the danger of progressives failing to see the difference between the two.
It turns out that it’s hard to write a roundup of happenings at the Duck of Minerva when there aren’t many to speak of. Much of that’s on me. What’s my excuse? Well, the kid finally contracted...
Like a lot of academics, I love Google n-grams, but not as much as the digitized archive Google uses to produce it. It’s a great warren of rabbit holes – even better than wikipedia – and I often...
At its core, the current war in Ukraine reflects an incompatibility of nationalist narratives. Many Ukrainians want to escape Russia’s imperial shadow. Putin wants to reextend that shadow – to erase Ukraine as an independent national identity.
Most versions of the left gain little and sacrifice much in accepting a realist epistemology. Theories of international relations are just tools for making sense of patterns and puzzles in the world; they don’t need groupies.
Two recent interviews in the New Yorker have received substantial attention in recent weeks. Unfortunately, taken together, they make the IR discipline look terrible. How can IR theorists demonstrate their discipline’s relevance in the face of rapidly changing historical events?
In 2014, John Mearsheimer authored a Foreign Affairs article in which he blamed that year’s Ukrai…
The problem with saying that Russia had legitimate security fears and that NATO expansion is partly to blame for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is that it omits some parts of the picture while exaggerating others. It creates a lopsided view. It magnifies every remote and hypothetical security threat to Russia, while ignoring the very real security threats to Russia’s neighbors, and ignoring Western efforts to accommodate Russia’s security concerns. The framing reflects habitual blindspots that have distorted many left-wing perspectives on Vladimir Putin and Russian foreign policy.
It's been a rough week for John Mearsheimer. He has come under a barrage of criticism for his claim that Russia's aggression towards Ukraine is the West's fault. His theoretical tradition, realism, has also come under fire, for producing not only (arguably) bad policy takes but policy takes that don't seem to flow from the theory itself. Does this mean that all of realism is flawed? I would argue no, by pointing to another target of such claims, Stephen Walt. This says something about how to make/keep realism relevant. The trouble with realism? Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine,...
I excitedly read this recent tweet by Evan Perkoski of UConn, about a new article he co-authored that has been accepted in International Organization. Beyond being glad for a colleague's success, I was excited by the substance of the publication. They produced a new dataset on violent non-state actors and analyzed the conditions under which they cooperated, finding a major role for both group ideology and religious identity. That is huge! Well-crafted data published in one of the top journals in the sub-field that found that religion drives a crucially important security issue. This should...
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 Martin, John Ruggie, Clifford and Charles Kupchan, and Alexander Wendt. Patrick and Dan discuss this important moment in the "paradigm wars" of the 1990s and 2000s.