There is more continuity in the history of U.S. military basing policy than is typically assumed.
On Continuity in U.S. Military Basing Practices
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Featured
Disentangling the Disaster in Afghanistan
This is a tragedy, but not for the reasons some think. The day after the Taliban seized Kabul, Afghanistan's capital, I received a few media inquiries. I said it's horrible that the Taliban have...
Episode 8 : Marwa Daoudy discusses Syria and Climate Change
Jarrod talks with Professor Marwa Daoudy about her new book, The Origins of The Syrian Conflict: Climate Change and Human Security (Cambridge, 2020).
6+1 Questions about Following the Leader: International Order, Alliance Strategies, and Emulation
Raymond Kuo answers 6 (+1) questions about his 2021 book on why the institutional design of alliances changes over time.
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Babies R Us
While in the US children are being separated from their parents seeking political asylum and taken to a Walmart prison, some Russian lawmakers are concerned that illegal aliens can enter the country through its citizens’ vaginas during the FIFA World Cup that starts today. Ms Pletnyova, the chairperson of the State Duma’s Family Affairs Committee, is warning Russian women against having sex with visiting foreigners, saying that they’ll be abandoned and left to raise their children alone: It’s ok, if it’s within one race, and if there is another one, that’s it. We should give birth to our...
What We Learned at the Future Strategy Forum
This post in the Bridging the Gap series come from Sara Plana and Rachel Tecott, doctoral candidates in the Department of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (Sara is also an alumna of BtG's New Era Workshop.) They are the founders of the Future Strategy Forum and co-organized the Future of Force conference held in May 2018. Follow them on Twitter @saracplana and @racheltecott. Last month, the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Kissinger Center at John Hopkins SAIS hosted a conference on the “Future of Force,” inaugurating a new series called...
We are Groot
Today is President Putin’s inauguration day and even Avengers couldn’t stop it, as evidenced by the arrested raccoon in the center of Moscow on Saturday during the unsanctioned rally ““He's No Tsar to Us.” For Russia watchers, the Saturday protests probably created a sense of déjà vu of May 2012 when much larger protests erupted in Moscow and around Russia. They displayed a high degree of social mobilization around the fair elections narrative, but the protesters paid a high price for it: over 30 were criminally charged and 17 were sentenced to several years in prison, some fled the country....
Rumor, Social Media, and the Question of Knowledge
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,...
What is Happening to the Non-Intervention Norm?
This is a guest post by Betcy Jose, Assistant Professor at University of Colorado-Denver and author of Norm Contestation: Insights into Non-Conformity with Armed Conflict Norms. Follow her on Twitter. After the recent strikes in Syria, Germany’s Angela Merkel stated the intervention was, “necessary and appropriate, to ensure the effectiveness of the international ban of chemical weapons use and to warn the Syrian regime of further violations.” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres remarked, “A lack of accountability emboldens those who would use such weapons by providing them with the...
Why Trump Won
In the academic community, the equivalent to ‘pics or it didn’t happen’ is ‘peer-review or it doesn’t count’. That’s why I decided to wait until I get some validation on the hypothesis about the Trump win that I was working on. The full paper is coming out in International Relations journal and this a (relatively) short teaser. Don’t worry, there is a Russian angle, just probably not the one you would expect. In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s presidential election victory, considerable blame was passed around by pundits and politicians alike, wondering how the Republican nominee managed to...
Does the U.S. Have a North Korea Strategy?
A Presidential summit in May is not a high risk / high reward scenario. It is Russian roulette. Last November the media poked fun when inclement weather kept Trump from getting his opportunity to stare down the enemy at the demilitarized zone (DMZ) separating North and South Korea. While Trump was reportedly frustrated with being denied this photo-op, it is regrettable for us all that he never made it. Despite the pageantry that comes with these visits, I know from experience that there is something visceral about standing at the world’s most heavily militarized border. There is a certain...
Academic (S)mothering
As a new mother of a baby boy I am enjoying a slightly different kind of golden shower than Donald Trump. So, between the 3 AM feeding and 4 AM diaper change I was scrolling through Twitter and stumbled on news about the Stanford white sausage fest that somehow qualified as a conference on applied history. Niall Ferguson managed to organize a conference and not feature a single woman or person of color. Let me walk you through some thoughts about why there aren’t more women in (political) science. I should note right away I am speaking from a place of relative (white) privilege. I do not...