The Duck of Minerva

Jarrod Hayes

Jarrod Hayes is an Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. His research interests include the IR theory, social construction of threat, societal mechanisms of security within democracies, and the social construction of environmental problems. His first book Constructing National Security: US Relations with India and China was published in 2013 by Cambridge University Press and his second, an edited volume entitled Constructivism Reconsidered, was published by University of Michigan Press 2018. He has published articles in numerous scholarly journals including European Journal of International Relations, Foreign Policy Analysis, Global Environmental Politics, International Affairs, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, Nonproliferation Review, and Security Studies.

Recent Posts

Rumor, Social Media, and the Question of Knowledge

Rumor, Social Media, and the Question of Knowledge

by Jarrod Hayes | 30 April, 2018 |

Some time ago, Charli reviewed an article I published in International Organization. In that review, Charli asked how do we know what we ‘know’ about the nature of external states. At the time, I thought the question an important one. In only a few years, the question has gone from important to absolutely critical. As the politics surrounding Trump’s election and administration, including the now pervasive claim of ‘fake news’ demonstrate, knowledge—and faith therein—is under strain. While knowledge has never been as objective or robust as most international relations (IR) scholars assume,...

read more

No Supply Without Demand: A Response to Stephen Walt

by Jarrod Hayes | 26 April, 2018 | ,

This is a guest post by Sarah Detzner, a Ph.D Candidate at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Her research is focused on international security, particularly post-conflict stabilization/reconstruction and security sector reform. In addition, she serves as Director of the Fletcher Graduate Writing Program, as a Fellow at the Center for Strategic Studies and the Institute for Human Security, and as a consultant for the World Peace Foundation. Previously, she served in the Obama Administration as a speechwriter for former Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, campaigned as an Obama 2008...

read more

Broken IR? It is worse than Walt lets on

by Jarrod Hayes | 22 February, 2018 | ,

As Josh has already noted,  grandee of IR Stephen Walt published a condemnation of US professional schools of IR, calling them broken and claiming that while there is superficial innovation the ‘rot runs deep’. After noting that we should expect US foreign policy (fopo) to be better than it is in the hands of foreign policy professionals—many of whom receive graduate education in institutions like Walt’s Kennedy School of Government at Harvard—Walt concludes that the schools of IR must share some of the blame . After this fairly breezy assessment, Walt goes on to outline five ways the...

read more
Charli’s Village: A Call to Arms

Charli’s Village: A Call to Arms

by Jarrod Hayes | 25 November, 2017 |

This is a tough post to write. In October, Charli was hospitalized for severe abdominal pain. Surgery revealed a large mass, and Charli was diagnosed with Burkitt’s Lymphoma—a systemic cancer of the immune system. This is a rare cancer, but fortunately it is highly treatable (doctors say the cancer is responding well) and Charli has access to some of the best doctors in the world in Boston. But, the treatment is brutal: an intensive, six month course of chemotherapy. Charli is soldiering on, dealing with the anticipated (the hair!) and unanticipated challenges of cancer diagnosis and...

read more

The emperor has no clothes moment for realism

by Jarrod Hayes | 20 November, 2017 | ,

Earlier this month the Washington Post ran a piece detailing increased efforts by Charles Koch’s eponymous foundation (hereafter CKF) to fund foreign policy programs in the United States (h/t to Josh for posting to Twitter). Notwithstanding one’s perspective on the Koch brothers’ politics, increased money for academia is a good thing, right? And all the CKF wants is to “ask questions about America’s proper role in the world and how we move forward”…to ‘broaden the debate’ about US foreign policy. All noble aims, and so I am sure the CKF is distributing money to institutions large and small...

read more

In Memorium: Peter Berger (1929-2017)

by Jarrod Hayes | 20 July, 2017 |

In a 2014 interview, Nick Onuf argued that IR has lost coherence as a field and should instead be considered “as a species of social relations and [to] abandon IR theory for social theory.” Were that to be the case, the work of Peter Berger would certainly contend for space at the top of the list of required reading. Berger, who passed away late last month, is well known to constructivist (and sympathetic) scholars for his 1966 book co-authored with Thomas Luckmann The Social Construction of Reality. That book, named by the International Sociological Association as the fifth most influential...

read more
Climate Change is remaking American Foreign Policy

Climate Change is remaking American Foreign Policy

by Jarrod Hayes | 6 July, 2017 | ,

We all know the traditional narrative in International Relations of the state as a unitary act. Despite substantial volumes of work in the foreign policy analysis subdiscipline as well as in IR theory, the common shorthand in IR scholarship is to say ‘China’ did X or ‘Britain’ bombed Y. At least in the case of the United States, climate change is going to force scholars and analysts to seriously reconsider those assumptions. In the wake of the Trump Administration’s (misguided) withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement, a number of subnational actors have come forward...

read more

Is the Liberal World Order Finished?

by Jarrod Hayes | 9 May, 2017 |

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 have killed it. The recent explosion in analysis focusing on what Donald Trump, or broader populist movements, mean for the future of world order have already written both the eulogy and the obituary for liberal internationalism. Robert Kagan makes this argument most bluntly in suggesting “the collapse of the world order, with all that entails, may not be far off.” Kagan is not alone. Others like...

read more
Wait, what? Or, Trump through the looking glass

Wait, what? Or, Trump through the looking glass

by Jarrod Hayes | 20 April, 2017 |

The Trump Administration’s foreign policy, if we can call it a policy, has certainly injected a degree of excitement into the foreign policy commentariat and IR classrooms around the world. Reading all the output is a full time job. But it is fair to say that most of the coverage has been, shall we say, less than favorable. Recently, Dani Nedal and Dan Nexon tackled the problems with Trump’s foreign policy unpredictability. Stephen Walt argued that Trump does not really care whether his foreign policy is successful. And the list goes on.   Which is why Matthew Kroenig’s recent piece in...

read more

Learning to Live with Militias in America

by Jarrod Hayes | 13 December, 2016 |

This is a guest post by Ariel I. Ahram (@arielahram). Ahram is an associate professor in Virginia Tech’s School of Public and International Affairs and is the author of Proxy Warriors: The Rise and Fall of State Sponsored Militias (Stanford, 2011). A few years ago the possibility that an American president would be complicit as armed supporters attacked members of opposition would have seemed far-fetched. Yet the alliance between president-elect Donald Trump and the so-called ‘alt-right’, a protean alignment of nativists, xenophobes, Christian identarians, and white supremacists, raises this...

read more