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 ballads, and generally bought into the hype. This year, we were excited to...
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...
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...
On the sidelines of the Pacific Islands Forum, Australia and Tuvalu just signed a new, major agreement—the Australia-Tuvalu Falepili Union Treaty. It binds Australia and Tuvalu much...
Recent chatter about David Remnick's interview of Stephen Kotkin reminds me of another interview that Kotkin recorded in February. Kotkin draws an analogy between Putin's decision to invade Ukraine and Stalin's decision to give Kim Il-sung the "green light" to invade South Korea in 1950. The comparison not only highlights the dysfunctions of personalist regimes, but the (potential) effects of the Russo-Ukraine War on U.S. foreign policy. Back in January, Gregory Mitrovich published an excellent piece about that in The Washington Post. Though the Cold War had begun several years before the...
Watching recent events (and inspired by this tweet about Latvia's PM's take on this), I am reminded of a famous misquotation from the American war in Vietnam: "we had to destroy the village in order to save it." Seems like Putin's Russia is killing the kin in order to save them. The attacks on the Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine are hurting those that Russia is supposedly trying to help. This speaks to a variety of ethnic/irredentist dynamics. First, when a country tries to reclaim supposedly lost territory, the ethnic kin in the lost territory don't have to demand this effort but it does...
The problem with saying that Russia had legitimate security fears and that NATO expansion is partly to blame for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is that it omits some parts of the picture while exaggerating others. It creates a lopsided view. It magnifies every remote and hypothetical security threat to Russia, while ignoring the very real security threats to Russia’s neighbors, and ignoring Western efforts to accommodate Russia’s security concerns. The framing reflects habitual blindspots that have distorted many left-wing perspectives on Vladimir Putin and Russian foreign policy.
For Mearsheimer “freedom” and “prosperity” are simply weapons of great power politics rather than aspirations sought by the Ukrainian people.
The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) originated in provincial-level efforts that sought to simultaneously integrate interior and frontier provinces to the rest of China as well as neighboring countries during the 1990s.
Coup d’états are less likely to succeed against rulers who “counterbalance” their militaries with presidential guards, militarized police, and other security forces outside of military command. But there may be downsides.
According to a recent tweet, which I am not going to link to, "CRT" led to "multiple civil wars and transnational conflicts by the 1990s" in the Soviet Union. The simple answer is no, but let me explain in more detail. Some have dubbed the Soviet Union an "affirmative action empire" that glorified internationalism, anti-racism, anti-colonialism; at home, however, one could see a much less rosy picture. The notion of nationality, which is bound in Western Europe to the concept of citizenship, derives in Russia from a Soviet atavism that included ‘Natsional’nost’ (ethnicity) in the vital...
Name Of The Book… And Its Coordinates? Jennifer D. Sciubba, ed. 2021. A Research Agenda for Political Demography (Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, Massachusetts, USA: Edward Elgar) What’s the Argument? We cannot understand contemporary international relations without understanding the demographic shifts going on around the world. Demographics – the characteristics of populations, such as age and location – are not just a backdrop for other, supposedly more important, forces. Population plays a key role in the outcomes of armed conflict, economic development, and political reform....