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...
A (very small) corner of the policy world got excited Monday afternoon: the Biden Administration announced its picks for top international religious freedom positions. This is an area I've worked in...
American Dove makes pragmatic case for a dovish foreign policy. The use of force is a terrible foreign-policy instrument: it’s expensive and hardly ever works.
The second- and third-most downloaded articles at the journal Security Studies both tackle the causes of the Iraq War. This might reflect an imbalance of supply and demand: there aren't that many...
The following is a guest post from Jeff Colgan, the Richard Holbrooke Associate Professor at Brown University. Colgan is a Bridging the Gap Policy Engagement Fellow. Follow him on Twitter at @JeffDColgan This publication was made possible (in part) by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York. The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author. July 20 marks six months into the Donald J. Trump administration. Now seems like a good time to step back from the daily headlines and take stock of the situation. To what extent is the United States...
This is a guest post from Seva Gunitsky, an associate professor at the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. His book Aftershocks: Great Powers and Domestic Reforms in the Twentieth Century was recently published by Princeton University Press. To understand the roots of the collusion, set aside Putin and follow the money. In the endless pursuit of the Russia-Trump collusion story, we sometimes forget a key element: this whole mess began with money, not with election interference. The connections between Trump and Russia were forged years ago, well before he developed...
We all know the traditional narrative in International Relations of the state as a unitary act. Despite substantial volumes of work in the foreign policy analysis subdiscipline as well as in IR theory, the common shorthand in IR scholarship is to say ‘China’ did X or ‘Britain’ bombed Y. At least in the case of the United States, climate change is going to force scholars and analysts to seriously reconsider those assumptions. In the wake of the Trump Administration’s (misguided) withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement, a number of subnational actors have come forward...
This a guest post from Robert M. Eisinger, a political science professor at Roger Williams University. He is the author of The Evolution of Presidential Polling (Cambridge University Press). Many of us recall reading the website 538 just prior to election day, and noted that there was a 71.4% probability that Hillary Clinton would garner more than 270 Electoral College votes than Donald Trump. Despite Secretary Clinton’s amassing 2.9 million more popular votes, Mr. Trump won the Electoral College and the presidency. The liberals and progressives’ zeitgeist had been disrupted and dislocated....
This is a guest post from Sean Kay, Robson Professor of Politics and Government, and Director of International Studies, at Ohio Wesleyan University. The interview quotes appear in his new book Rockin’ the Free World! How the Rock & Roll Revolution Changed America and the World (2017). There is power in rock and roll – an art form that has modernized American values and helped them to ripple around the world – advancing freedom, equality, human rights, and peace. Over the last several years I was fortunate to interview about sixty major rock and roll artists, songwriters, producers,...
In the aftermath of Trump's visit to Brussels one dynamic has been overlooked. It starts with a basic reality of NATO: when there is a mission, countries are not obligated to hand over military units for the effort. Instead, what happens is this (see chapter two of Dave and Steve's book), as one officer told us that "force generation is begging:" The officers at the NATO military headquarters in Mons, Belgium, along with the relevant regional command come up with a spreadsheet. Yes, an excel spreadsheet called the Combined Joint Statement of Requirements. The CJSOR is a list of all of...
The perhaps apocryphal story is that in the wake of the 2016 election, submissions to top journals in political science declined by 15% or more. While this sabbatical year has been productive in many respects, I have not made as much progress on a book project as I would have liked. I wonder why? Last week's events -- the dramatic firing of FBI Director James Comey and the series of justifications and admissions by the president and his team -- have underscored the challenge for all of us in terms of allocating our time and attention. This is an academic blog informed by our sensibilities...
This is a guest post by Dillon Stone Tatum, Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and Geography at Francis Marion University. If the liberal world order isn’t dead, commentators have killed it. The recent explosion in analysis focusing on what Donald Trump, or broader populist movements, mean for the future of world order have already written both the eulogy and the obituary for liberal internationalism. Robert Kagan makes this argument most bluntly in suggesting “the collapse of the world order, with all that entails, may not be far off.” Kagan is not alone. Others like...