Charles A. Dainoff, Robert M. Farley, and Geoffrey F. Williams answer questions about their new book
6+1 Questions about Waging War with Gold: National Security and the Finance Domain Across the Ages
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Recent Posts
Liberty’s in every blow!
Scotland's independence drive won't disappear anytime soon. In "Scots Wha Hae," (from which the title of this post comes) Robert Burns calls on Scots to remember their victory over the English at...
Susan Sell: A World Class Scholar and Human Being
This is the third in our series of remembrances on the late scholar Susan Sell. Professor Susan Sell was a world class scholar. But even though one of the papers she wrote (about using ideas...
Remembering Susan Sell
This is the second in our series of remembrances on the late scholar Susan Sell. Since I learned of Susan’s untimely passing on Christmas Eve, I’ve been trying to articulate exactly how important...
More Recent Posts
Why Western Conservatives are Freaking about U.S. Decline
I was just about to block "Afghanistan" as a key word in my Twitter timeline when I saw several people asking why British conservatives were even more freaked out about the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan than American conservatives. The question was in response to the UK defense secretary saying...
Liberal Order Beyond Neoliberalism
G. John Ikenberry is one of the most influential scholars of “liberal international order.” It’s likely that he, along with Dan Deudney, is responsible for popularizing the phrase. John’s most recent book, A World Safe for Democracy: Liberal Internationalism and the Crises of Global Order has reportedly shaped the thinking of the Biden foreign-policy team. I interviewed him for a recent podcast.
They Blinded Them With Science
Musgrave’s identification of dangerous ideas is correct, but his metaphor risks entrenching the fundamental problem: the (inevitable) weaponization of “scientific objectivity.”
Leaving the lab
Perhaps the problem isn’t that theories leak from the lab, but efforts to seal the lab in the first place. If political scientists spent more time observing the policy world, me might get both better and more careful theories in the first place.
The Leakage Between Political Science and Policy Goes Both Ways
Political Science isn’t sterile laboratory. The discipline is riddled with politics and deeply influenced by policy concerns.
How Can We Vaccinate Against Viral Political Science?
Some political-science lab leaks are more difficult to control than others.
The Democratic Peace isn’t a Virus
Paul Musgrave has written an important piece discussing how ideas developed within academia can have profoundly negative effects when they escape into the wild of the policymaking world. For someone like me who has been involved for many years in the Bridging the Gap project, whose...
Political-Science Lab Leaks: a Symposium
Today we're kicking off a new symposium on Paul Musgrave's Foreign Policy article, "Political Science Has Its Own Lab Leaks." In it, Musgrave likens academic disciplines to labs; academic theories that exercise political influence, in his metaphor, are like viruses. Perhaps, his piece suggests,...
Will Afghanistan Hurt U.S. Credibility?
What we know about reputation and credibility doesn’t track with the claims of doomsayers. But it also doesn’t accord with those who argue that there’s “nothing to see here.”
6+1 Questions about “Rethinking causal explanation in interpretive international studies”
Ludvig Norman answers 6+1 questions about causal inference in interpretative scholarship
They do not don what they hoist
Always attack. Even in defense, attack. The attacking arm possesses the initiative and thus commands the action. To attack makes men brave; to defend makes them timorous. Steven Pressfield, The Virtues of War Does America even know where is it heading? Fictitiously yes. Geopolitically no. So it...
How Tunisia Could still be the Arab Spring* Success** Story
Everyone is (rightly) thinking about Afghanistan, but I'm still thinking of Tunisia. Each fall I teach a Middle East politics class. And each fall I end our discussion on the Arab Spring with a debate over whether the Arab Spring actually mattered. Most students end up arguing that it didn't, or...