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...
I recently posted a piece at Lawyers, Guns and Money about Jonathan Swan’s two-part series on Trumpworld’s plans for a second term. The gist is that Trump and his inner circle intend...
Our next Bridging the Gap Book Nook features Tom Long of the University of Warwick. He discusses his new Oxford University Press book, A Small State's Guide to Influence in World Politics....
On February 24, just hours after Russia launched its assault on Ukraine, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock tweeted a simple message: “Today we are waking up in a different Europe....
This is a guest post from Sean D. Ehrlich, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Florida State University who researches international and comparative political economy, trade policy, and democratic institutions. His first book, Access Points, was published by Oxford University Press in 2011 and his second book, The Politics of Fair Trade, was published by Oxford University Press in 2018. He can be found on Twitter @SeanDEhrlich. As the coronavirus pandemic continues to rage across the European Union, the EU itself has been relatively inactive, leaving it up to the member states to...
This is a guest post from Andrew Yeo, who is an Associate Professor of Politics at The Catholic University of America in Washington DC and a Fulbright Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Political Science at the University of the Philippines Diliman. His most recent books include Asia’s Regional Architecture: Alliances and Institutions in the Pacific Century and North Korean Human Rights: Activists and Networks (with Danielle Chubb). As a US scholar on research leave in Manila, I’ve been following the COVID-19 response in both the Philippines and the United States...
In an attempt to distract myself from the thought that today my small university town will be overrun by 900 frat boys who went to Northern Italy on a skiing vacation despite the Dutch government’s warning, let’s discuss something that might have gone under the radar – future changes to the Russian Constitution. Amid a global pandemic what could be better than voting in a Referendum? Only voting for a President, amirite? But let’s start from the beginning. Mid-January Russian President Vladimir Putin suddenly announced that the Russian Constitution might need some freshening up....
The following is a guest post by Andrew Leber, a PhD candidate in Government at Harvard University. The death of Sultan Qaboos bin Said, and the succession of Haitham bin Tariq as the country’s new ruler, was yet one more high-profile news item this year amid the back-and-forth attacks and tragic consequences of events further up the Gulf. Yet for the world of political science, this transition calls to mind important questions for comparativists about authoritarian successions in particular and authoritarian institutions more general. Thinking about Authoritarian SuccessionWhen are...
Depending on your Twitter addiction, you either went to sleep or woke up with the news that America had assassinated Qassim Suleimani, the commander of Iran's Quds force. Suleimani was one of the most powerful men in Iran, and the driver of its activities in the Middle East, so this is a big deal. People are debating whether this was just and necessary, and what happens next. But I wanted to raise a different point: what this means for America's Persian Gulf allies. Many would suspect these states--particularly Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE)--to be the biggest winners in...
On an ice-cold winter evening I arrived in Moscow to untangle the riddle that is Russia. After reading two op-eds by Anne Applebaum and Bill Browder I knew what this country was about but I just wanted to see it for myself. The eyes of the border control guards reflected the thousand years of Russia’s repressive regime. I was half-expecting the KGB to arrest me there and then because four years ago I posted on Facebook that I didn’t like Vlad, but they let me through. My Moscow adventure had begun. The shadow of Stalin still looms large over this sprawling city. As soon as you approach the...
Fieldwork – “leaving one’s home institution in order to acquire data, information, or insights that significantly inform one’s research”(Kapiszewski, MacLean, and Read 2015: 1) – has long been a cornerstone of social science research. It is a remarkably diverse enterprise: ‘doing fieldwork’ can mean carrying out archival research, interviews, surveys, focus groups, participant observation, ethnography, or experiments. Fieldwork is also quite valuable: it helps orient scholars toward under-addressed ontological questions, including whether many of the concepts that we routinely study actually...
So by this point we all know the big news on Syria. Overnight, Trump announced that--after consulting with Turkish President Erdogan--the US would be pulling troops out of north Syria, giving Turkey freedom to operate. This would likely involve military actions against Kurdish forces there, which Turkey fears are coordinating with Kurdish insurgents in Turkey. This is concerning for two reasons. First, the United States had worked with these Kurdish forces to fight ISIS, so we're basically abandoning them. Second, this will basically leave ISIS detention camps unguarded, possibly letting...