When I was but a lad, it was still quite common for foreign-policy hawks to invoke “Munich” as an all-purpose rebuttal to compromise with (they would say the “appeasement of”) rival states, most notably the Soviet Union. The failure of the 1938 agreement — which...
Last year I was on a sabbatical in Edinburgh, and my family and I watched Eurovision for the first time. We loved the out-there electro-pop versions of local folk music, got bored by the slow...
Even though the school year is ending, protests against Israel--most prominent on college campuses--will likely continue. Beginning at Columbia University, they gained attention and spread after a...
Intra-elite, state-centric society is a strategic front, and ought to be defended and put to use in the continued development of a global and decolonial turn in IR.
Even when Latin Americans are allowed to speak, IR scholars and practitioners do not listen to them due to the language in which they produce knowledge, epistemic violence and access barriers.
On February 21, the Federal Supreme Court of Iraq ruled on a set of cases pertaining to the Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) electoral law. The Court declared that the 11 parliamentary reserved seats for minorities were unconstitutional. So too was the KRG’s single electoral district model. The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) officials and their opposition supporters hailed the move. The Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) rejected the decisions. Washington dithered, emphasizing that the upcoming Kurdish elections should be free, fair, and timely. The Court’s decision is not actually...
I recently submitted the below letter to Foreign Affairs in response to their latest issue's set of essays on Israel-Palestine peace. They decided not to run it, and I assume that's because of all the letters they get. However, I worry that we ignore the small-scale peace efforts that may be the best way to advance peace (or see them as problematic) so I wanted to post it here and try to make the case for them. My letter to Foreign Affairs To the editor, I commend Foreign Affairs for the set of essays in the March/April 2024 issue exploring whether and how peace is still possible...
126 countries now publish a national security strategy or defense document, and 45 of these feature
a leaders’ preambles. How these talk about the world, or not, is surprisingly revealing of historical
global strategic hierarchies.
Scotland's independence drive won't disappear anytime soon. In "Scots Wha Hae," (from which the title of this post comes) Robert Burns calls on Scots to remember their victory over the English at the Battle of Bannockburn, and never lose their desire for independence. Observers of UK politics, who assume Scottish independence is dead, would be well-served to re-read this poem. Why some are writing off Scottish independence In a recent article on Scottish politics, The Economist mocked a statement by Humza Yousaf--Scotland's First Minister--that an industrial policy modeled on US President...
A controversy broke out the weekend before Christmas, when Fr. Edward Beck, a Roman Catholic priest, claimed Jesus was a "Palestinian Jew" while discussing the current war between Israel and Hamas. Some may dismiss this as a disingenuous conservative freak-out; for example, the article I linked to was in the New York Post and figures such as Stephen Miller and Erick Erickson were among the outraged. This would be a mistake. Fr. Beck was inaccurate, and such inaccuracies actually make it harder to build peace in the region. History and Christmas Americans are used to fights over the "true...
As if there was not enough trouble around the world as it is, Nicolas Maduro, the autocratic president of Venezuela, has kept us at the edge of our seats for the last couple of weeks after calling for a referendum to incorporate Guayana Esequiba—two-thirds of neighboring Guyana—into Venezuelan territory, issuing new maps, announcing plans to drill oil from the territory, and exercising a fiery rhetoric. The reactivation of this territorial dispute is particularly puzzling in a region with a strong territorial integrity norm. Pessimists raised some alarm about the influence of new...
The Blue Pacific is far from monolithic—diverse in its politics, regime types, degrees of sovereignty, and ways of thinking about strategy. Given its bigger-than-continental scale, it could hardly be otherwise. And there are problematic sub-regional cleavages among Micronesia, Polynesia, and Melanesia. But there’s a stronger imprint here of what I recognize as an organically progressive strategic culture than elsewhere in the world. It’s not that everyone here is progressive or espouses a coherent strategic-cultural perspective—not even close. And patriarchy is a huge problem in some Pacific...