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...
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...
A lot of ink has been spilled and bytes spent on the reflections over Trump's failed assassination this past weekend. I won't pretend I know better, although as a regular academic that's kind of my...
When I was but a lad, it was still quite common for foreign-policy hawks to invoke “Munich” as an all-purpose rebuttal to compromise with (they would say the “appeasement of”) rival states, most...
If Donald Trump was President of the United States when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, instead of Joe Biden, Trump’s personality would have led to a very different U.S. response. Trump would not have swiftly and strongly condemned Russia or clearly sided with Ukraine in the initial stages of the invasion, and he would not have brought together a multilateral front against Russia – as Biden did.
Oppenheimer is the first blockbuster about nuclear weapons in a generation. Framing his film’s namesake with kinetic edits, fractured timelines, quantum imagery, and a pulsing score, director Christopher Nolan has crafted a stylistic triumph. But...
The benefits of bridging the gap between academics and policymakers are well-known, but much of the research and practice is based on experiences in the United States. How well does it translate to other countries? A recent collaboration between Bridging the Gap (BtG) and Monash University in...
Typical energy transitions unfold over 50 to 100 years. The urgency of the climate challenge means that humanity doesn’t have that kind of time. While market developments in renewables and electric vehicles are favorable, even those developments will not transform the energy landscape without...
Alongside research and teaching, most tenure-track jobs come with some expectation of service.
Current trends in the academic job market paint a bleak picture. Data from U.S. universities reveal a drop in job postings in the Politics field over the past three years and a decline in tenure-track positions over the last decade. For 2021-22, APSA reported that 53.12% of job listings were...
Carol Cohn is the G.O.A.T. Back in 1987, she wrote what is still the best gendered take on the pathologies of deterrence in a piece called, “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals.” It absolutely demolishes the cult of the missile bro. And every deterrence scholar I know...
Robert Cox’s landmark article, “Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Rela…
Even well-intentioned warnings of political violence in the United States potentially leading to civil war may inadvertently strengthen the very same actors who are intent on making civil war a reality.
Just like Al Qaeda in its heyday, armed accelerationists in America are strategic actors who take advantage of narrative ammunition that is handed to them.
A narrative perspective lends itself to pro-active approaches, not just appropriate restraint.
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 prepare for the upcoming history classes (big surprise, I am a nerd). Old habits die hard, so this summer...
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 government's attempted "judicial overhaul," that fear is now very much in the open, Almost overnight,...
Earlier this week, a boat carrying migrants fleeing Afghanistan sank in the English Channel, killing six. Earlier this month, 41 died after a ship sailing from Tunisia sank near Italy. There are many more examples of such tragedies I could point to, and, sadly, there will be many more in the...