I recently had the good fortune to participate in a week-long academic exchange to Israel, along with 20 or so other political scientists and historians. Because Israel isn’t one of the countries I have a lot of knowledge of, I thought this might be an opportunity to...
For Jewish Israeli politicians the temptation to draw back into what is left of the old ethnic consensus will be great. But including the Palestinian citizens in politics and society is the only way to defend Israeli democracy.
I've started practicing mindfulness, partly to deal with the stress of being a Professor and parent of small kids in a pandemic, and partly to reduce the number of times I become unreasonably angry...
Photo courtesy of Cicero Online. This is a guest post by Timothy Sisk, professor of international studies and director of the Institute for Comparative and Regional Studies at the Josef...
Since the U.S. election Iranian-American relations have gone into a rapid tailspin, with Iran reacting to the triumphalist tenor of the Trump campaign and the improvised response of former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn that sought to “put Iran on notice.” The arrival of his replacement in General H.R. McMaster offers the U.S. a fresh opportunity to tone down its approach to Iran, beginning with guarding against any dramatic escalation of the stakes. For unless the Administration is actually willing to go to war with Iran, this confrontation actually won't get the U.S. anywhere...
Do you think this person is white? If you are from Europe or North America, you might have said yes. If you are from Russia, you might have described this person as black. Most IR peeps are familiar with the fluid perceptions of whiteness and blackness that exist in the word: Sandor Gilman wrote, for instance, how Irish immigrants in the US in the beginning of the century were often considered black. The irony of blackness could not be more poignant in Russia: the famous Russian Armenian actor Frunzik Mkrtchan whose picture I put above is literally Caucasian, because he comes from the South...
(Cross-posted on Just Security) Here’s a list of questions I hope will be asked of Judge Neil Gorsuch, the President’s nominee to fill the vacant Supreme Court seat, at his Senate confirmation hearing. Most of these questions are related to security, individual rights, executive authority and requirements that the President serve without conflicts of interest. That these are necessary questions raises a larger question about whether, to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, we will keep the Constitutional republic our Founders entrusted to us, as the President's first weeks in power raise serious...
So far, 2017 has been a tough year in Israel for its Palestinian citizen minority. From a xenophobic billboard campaign across the country to a village demolition turned violent in the Negev, the past several weeks have highlighted issues around power and inequality in a country whose democratic aspirations are weighed down by its ethno-national identity. As deep power differentials across society have come to the fore, what does the literature say about whether empathy might help to increase support for social justice? Yale psychologist Paul Bloom’s new book on empathy (called, fittingly,...
For the past few months, I've been observing with horror all the cabinet appointments in the incoming Trump administration and the Theresa May government . As someone who originally did a PhD with the intent to become a career diplomat (and yes, I realize there's a foreign civil service pathway to achieve precisely that goal), to me expertise in top-level agencies was more than a mere technicality: it was a requirement. I wanted a PhD in international relations or political science because I wanted to be knowledgeable about the dynamics of global affairs, diplomacy and state-to-state...
This World Politics in a Time of Populist Nationalism (WPTPN) guest post is written by Fiona B. Adamson, an Associate Professor of International Relations at SOAS, University of London. In the aftermath of the UK Brexit vote, London Mayor Sadiq Khan and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo issued a joint letter committing themselves to work more closely together and to deepen connections between cities in Europe and across the world, declaring that “the 21st century belongs to cities.” They are not the only ones who think so – sociologists, geographers, urban studies scholars and others have long...
This post is a co-authored piece: Heather M. Roff, Jamie Winterton and Nadya Bliss of Arizona State's Global Security Initiative We’ve recently been informed that the Clinton campaign relied heavily on an automated decision aid to inform senior campaign leaders about likely scenarios in the election. This algorithm—known as “Ada”—was a key component, if not “the” component in how senior staffers formulated campaigning strategy. Unfortunately, we know little about the algorithm itself. We do not know all of the data that was used in the various simulations that it ran, or what its...
In this, the first of a sequence of posts addressing Brexit in one way or another, I want to take a look at the shifting systems of authority in the current political climate and comment on how they might impact international relations into the future. At the time of the Brexit vote, commentators and news reports drew parallels between the British decision to the leave the EU and the tumult of the US elections, particularly the rise of Donald Trump. Many pointed to the resurgence of nationalism, but here I want to argue that while the concept of nationalism as a practice of identity...