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.
Ongoing instability in the Sahel – involving worsening insurgent violence, deepening great power competition, and frequent coups – is exposing weaknesses in U.S. Africa policy. In fact, three years...
When I was in middle school I loved history: ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, the Middle Ages always fascinated me. Often during the summer vacation, I would read the history books in advance to...
For nearly three decades, a pervasive, unspoken fear of civil war created an "ugly stalemate" in Israel, a 'public secret' that pervaded its electoral politics and foreign relations. Thanks to the...
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....
Anwar Gargash, a diplomatic advisor to the UAE, recently spoke to an international conference on the UAE's desire to smooth over tensions with Turkey and Iran. Turkey and the UAE found themselves on opposite sides of the Arab Spring, with the former supporting revolutionary movements around the Middle East and the latter trying to frustrate them. And the UAE shares Saudi concerns about Iran's influence. This may be, as Trita Parsi recently wrote, part of a broader pattern of regional reconciliation sparked by America's withdrawal. But I think there is something unique to the UAE in this...
Over the past six months or so, I've gotten a lot of pings about NATO and the "Big 3" (UK, France, and Germany) taking on a role in Asia — and specifically a bigger military presence in the region. The issue has come up a few times on my podcast. I got an early preview of a book about a closely related question by a European scholar. I've had EU parliamentary staffers reach out to me about this. And I gave an interview to a lefty newspaper in Norway that was trying to make sense of NATO's approach to China/Asia/Indo-Pacific. It keeps coming up. Then, of course, the big Australia-US-UK...
Though unlikely to happen any time soon, recent calls for the US to pay reparations to the Afghan people provide an opportunity to reflect on the complexities of reparations and global justice.