The thirteenth Duck of Minerva podcast features Nicholas Onuf. Nick is one of the “founding parents” of contemporary constructivism. His book, World of Our Making: Rules and Rule in Social Theory and International Relation — which has been reissued by Routledge — introduced the term to describe an approach to the study of world politics.
The podcast is wide-ranging — part of oral history, part interview, part discussion — such that I’ve had difficulty figuring out how to insert chapters. If you’re listening via m4a, you’ll see that the podcast has only a few chapter titles. “Enter Constructivism,” for example, contains not only information about World of Our Making but also about the state of the field in the 1980s, the rise of liberal institutionalism, and so on.
When not on hiatus, Duck of Minerva Podcasts generally come out at the end of each week. They appear in our normal RSS feed, but you can subscribe to the podcasts directly via https://www.duckofminerva.com/podcast/. To subscribe via iTunes go to “Advanced” and then choose “Subscribe to Podcast” and paste the feed URL). Individual episodes may be downloaded from the Podcasts tab.
For now, I’m uploading files in both m4a and mp3 format. If you can’t get the former to play, try the mp3 version. Note that people seem to be having real trouble streaming the audio files from the podcasts tab, so you might try downloading them.
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.
Wonderful episode! The last discussion about IR as part of a larger social scientific/sociological exploration of modernity and globalization provided a particularly reassuring eureka moment for me.
I’m glad you liked it. It was a lot of fun to record. I’m thinking that I need to do more of these in-person. Perhaps ISA will be very busy this year?