Calling all hands

31 January 2009, 0845 EST

If recent posts are any indication, Laura Rozen has finally stopped referring to virtually every rumored or confirmed Obama foreign-policy appointee as a “hand,” as in “a a think tank hand” and “Clinton-era NSC Africa hand”and “former CIA Latin America analyst and NSC hand” and “top foreign-policy hands” and “several Washington South Asia hands” and “veteran negotiator of the Dayton accords and sharp-elbowed foreign policy hand” and “a long time Africa hand and foreign service officer”and “Hill foreign policy hand”, etc.

She’s doing wonderful work, especially for people like me who have some concrete interest in finding out where people are going, but I’m starting to think she needs to invest in a thesaurus.

Dan Nexon

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.