@ The Duck of Minerva

Podcast No. 9 – Interview with Kathryn Sikkink

Featured • Minerva Cast • Podcasting

by Dan Nexon

22 09 2012

The ninth episode of the Duck of Minerva Podcast just went live. In it, I interview Kathryn Sikkink about a variety of subjects, including her new book, The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions are Changing World Politics (W.W. Norton, 2011).

Contents

  • Introduction
  • Developmentalism in Latin America
  • Focusing on “Ideas” in the late 1980s and early 1990s
  • Activists Beyond Borders… and Beyond
  • The Justice Cascade
  • What Happaned to the Identity Agenda in Mainstream Constructivism?
  • The Persistent Power of Human Rights
  • Agency and Constructivism
  • Advice for Younger Scholars
  • End Matter

Note: podcasts now seem to be appearing every Friday, give or take. We’ll see how long we can sustain it.
A reminder: I am running the podcast feed on a separate blog. You can subscribe to our podcasts either via that blog’s Feedburner feed or its original atom feed (to do so within iTunes, go to “Advanced” and then choose “Subscribe to Podcast” and paste the feed URL). Individual episodes may be downloaded from the Podcasts tab.

Comments or thoughts on either this podcast or the series so far? Leave them here.

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.

4 Comments
  1. Jarrod Hayes
    Jarrod Hayes on 27 September 2012 at 02.02 EDT

    Another really great interview Dan. Really like the commentary on agency.

    • dnexon
      dnexon on 27 September 2012 at 02.05 EDT

      Thanks!

  2. LFC
    LFC on 27 September 2012 at 02.58 EDT

    I listened to it a few days ago. Yes, a good interview. The stuff at the end got me thinking about maybe writing a post on change/continuity. Because I think it’s in some sense too pat to say, as Sikkink did, that no perspective explains change well — yes, but maybe that’s because change is just hard to explain. She dissed Wendt as a structuralist and talked about ‘agentic’ constructivism but didn’t even nod in the direction of relationalism — a bit odd, one might have thought, given that you (Dan) are a proponent of that view. I’m not a huge fan of relationalism myself, to the extent that I understand it, but not to mention it seemed a bit odd. Of course it was getting toward the end and time was running out. (Btw, the stuff at the beginning about her early work was also interesting.)

    • dnexon
      dnexon on 27 September 2012 at 03.10 EDT

      Doing an interview is much harder — for both interviewer and subject — than it would appear. So the fact that somebody doesn’t mention something is neither here nor there. For example, I’m putting up an interview with Vincent Pouliot on Friday in which we completely forget to talk about Ted’s criticism of his version of the practice turn!

      As a general matter, I should warn people that — despite my agonistic blog personality — I’m not likely to engage interview subjects in extended debates. I do think Kathryn’s comments are a great springboard for exactly this conversation.