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.
Security
The Fascist Nuke Problem
The world could use some serious thinking about the relationship between political ideology and nuclear escalation—specifically far-right pathways to nuclear war. The nuclear strategy...
What about the locals?: Taking stock of the ASEAN and IORA positions on the ‘Indo-Pacific’
The Indo-Pacific is an increasingly contested space. Literature on the region revolves around the notion that China’s deepening regional footprint has exacerbated apprehensions in Washington,...
Some just want to watch the world burn
During a pivotal scene in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, Bruce Wayne talks with his butler/confidante Alfred about The Joker. Wayne suggests he can make sense of The Joker's motivation as a...
More Security Posts
Indeterminacy, Uncertain Contexts and the Dual Nature of Norms
When it comes norm dynamics and how we theorize them, uncertainty presents something of a paradox. We study norms because we think that they matter. But if norms are inherently uncertain, then how is it possible that they constitute, constrain, and otherwise shape the behavior of global actors? Unless norms produce stable and defined expectations, then how can they have the power to structure international politics?
Autonomous Weapons Systems: Uncertainty and Anticipatory Norm-building
Since 2014 the international community has considered the issue of autonomy in weapons systems under the framework of the United Nations (UN) Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW). Despite hopes that 2022 would see some kind of breakthrough, the 2019 eleven guiding principles remains the only international agreement regarding lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS or AWS). Many believe that action is long overdue. The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots argues that: With ongoing uncertainties around technological change and instabilities in international security, a principled...
Indoctrinate Me Softly
“Some came to kill and the others came to protect” says the main male character with a charisma of a doorknob to his love interest in the “based on real events” movie “Crimea” (2017), financed by the Russian Ministry of Defense. The hour and a half epic features many equally deep and meaningful conversations between a female Ukrainian journalist from Kyiv and a male Russian soldier from Sebastopol whose romance is set against the annexation of Crimea in 2014. In its official annotation, “Crimea” promises not a saga of the two warring clans of Montague and Capulet. This is a story about...
Was the Colorado nightclub attack terrorism? Does it matter?
Once again, America is enduring the horrors of a mass shooting. This time a gunman attacked a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs, opening fire before patrons grabbed his weapon and beat him with it. As of the time of writing (Monday morning) five are dead, and there are fears the number will increase. And once again, we are trying to make sense of this. Why did the shooter do this? What could have prevented this? Was this "random, senseless" violence or a targeted attack? Or was it something more, a terrorist attack against the country's LGBTQ population? What makes something terrorism?...
Podcast Recommendations
Looking for some podcast episodes to give a listen to? I’ve got suggestions.
Reframing the Cuban Missile Crisis in (Postcolonial) Time and Space
Any veteran (or better, victim) of a US grad program in IR will be familiar with the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. The Crisis is widely considered a turning point in the Cold War, the moment when both Soviet and American leaders realized that they had come perilously close to a devastating nuclear exchange that could have led to a global war. From then onwards, we are told, relations between the two superpowers took on a different cast, and indeed they did, but not necessarily only for the reasons usually ascribed to them. With the passage of time and the consolidation of...
The Quincy Institute is not a progressive foreign-policy think tank
The debacle over the Congressional Progressive Caucus’ letter on Ukraine reflects the underlying tensions between progressive values and realist grand strategies of restraint—as well as the danger of progressives failing to see the difference between the two.
On the Legitimating Effects of Brinksmanship
This post is the first in a four part symposium on the Cuban Missile Crisis, one of the the most studied cases of IR. With the release of documents in recent decades, historical revisions have challenged the received wisdom informed by mainstream approaches to nuclear strategy and a US-centric perspective. However, these revisionist accounts are not well incorporated by IR narratives of the crisis. Sixty years later, a revisiting of the legitimating role that the missile crisis plays in theories of nuclear deterrence and...