As someone who studies terrorism and religion, I approach each Christmas with dread due to the possibility of terrorist attacks around the holiday. A string of bombings hit churches in Indonesia and the Philippines in 2000, killing over 40. In 2016, someone drove a...
Like many who follow the Middle East, a lot has been going through my head since the civil war there suddenly reignited and Bashar al-Assad's regime even more suddenly fell. Will the victims of his...
We’re living in a world where policymakers are playing Russian roulette with our lives and calling it “stability.” We need to think differently about nukes and the risks of war. Specifically, we...
On October 23rd, militants attacked a Turkish aerospace facility near the capital of Ankara. The Turkish government blamed the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK)--a Kurdish insurgent group--and launched...
“A specter is haunting strategic studies—the specter of peace.” These bizarre words are from Richard Betts, who provocatively presented peace itself as a problem in a largely forgotten article from 1997 asking, “Should Strategic Studies Survive?” Betts answered his title question in the affirmative. As one of the most prominent scholars that strategic studies has ever produced, it’s unsurprising Betts would come to the field’s defense. It’s more surprising, though, considering that Betts has a long record warning about the limits of the use of force and expressing skepticism about...
The implications of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump over the weekend remain unclear. Will it lead him to strike a more conciliatory tone during the upcoming Republican National Convention? Will it make more Americans sympathize with him? And then there are the questions of what led to the shooting. Why did this individual try to kill Trump? These questions were intensified by the news that the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is investigating the incident as domestic terrorism. It is too early to conclusively determine why this happened--and we may never know as the...
Labour MP David Lammy has a new piece in Foreign Affairs called, “The Case for Progressive Realism.” Where his manifesto is punchiest is in its unsparing critiques of British foreign policy: the Conservative Party has, over 14 years…sank deeply into nostalgia and denial about the United Kingdom’s place in the world. The government, for example, crashed out of the European Union without a clear plan for what to do next. It treated with contempt the country’s global reputation for upholding the rule of law…it squandered the United Kingdom’s climate leadership by tearing up net-zero carbon...
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.
If international relations as a field is to have a just purpose—not just justifying the power-hoarding and power-wielding of a ruling class—it needs more concepts to critique power, relate policy to peaceful ends, and surface rather than shroud the price that others pay for what our states do in the world. Most IR scholars imagine ourselves toiling on behalf of the greater good. But if the policy implications of our work rationalizes more guns and bombs, more death, more inequality, more erasure of marginalized and oppressed people, at a certain point we have to question which side of...
In 2015, Linus Hagström, a professor of political science at the Swedish Defence University, questioned the wisdom of Sweden joining NATO in a coauthored opinion piece. After its publication, some of his colleagues, especially those in the Swedish military, ostracized Hagström. Some even accused him of being a traitor, “running errands” for Russian propaganda, and called for him to be fired. So what actually happened to Hagström? Simply put, he committed heresy. In the national security policy community, some ideas become orthodoxies in which dissent against them is profane. For...
International relations discourse tends to be a bit wonkier than domestic American political debates. While this leads to the frequent lament, from voices like Dan Drezner, that American voters don't care about international relations, it also insulates us from the more frustrating aspects of American politics. IR scholars don't usually have to deal with knee-jerk activisty hot takes. Well, we do now. Apparently leftists think the Houthis--a militant group based in Yemen--are admirable anti-imperialist activists. This is because they've been attacking international shipping in protest of...
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...