Robert Cox’s landmark article, “Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Rela…
Episode 32: Social Forces, States, and Clydeside Whisky
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Recent Posts
6+1 Questions about Armed Guests: Territorial Sovereignty and Foreign Military Basing
The practice of maintaining a long-term, peacetime military presence in another state (or “sovereign basing”) only developed in the last century. Before World War II, a foreign military presence usually meant one of three things: occupation, colonization, or a wartime alliance. This changed radically in the years after 1945.
Robert Jervis
As many of our readers have likely already heard, Robert Jervis died yesterday. The field has lost a gentle intellectual giant. Unlike many of my friends from Columbia, Bob wasn't on my dissertation...
Tarak Barkawi
Professor Tarak Barkawi joins Brent this week. He discusses growing up in Orange County in the 1970s and 1980s, in a very politically aware family, and his varied interests in military history but...
More Recent Posts
Duck Retirement: what 7 years of blogging has given me
It's time. I'm signing off as permanent member of the Duck of Minerva after seven (7!?!) years of blogging. The experience has helped shape me as a professional, writer, and member of the IR and online communities. I began blogging during my first nervous year as an academic and continued through...
WPTPN: The Loss of the American Narrative
This World Politics in a Time of Populist Nationalism (WPTPN) guest post is written by Aida A. Hozić is an Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Florida. This blogpost draws on a chapter prepared for Hegemony and Leadership in the International Political Economy,...
Learning to Live with Militias in America
This is a guest post by Ariel I. Ahram (@arielahram). Ahram is an associate professor in Virginia Tech’s School of Public and International Affairs and is the author of Proxy Warriors: The Rise and Fall of State Sponsored Militias (Stanford, 2011). A few years ago the possibility that an American...
WPTPN: Trump and The End of Taken-For-Grantedness: When the Exception Becomes the Rule
This World Politics in a Time of Populist Nationalism (WPTPN) guest post is written by Antje Wiener, Professor of Political Science and Global Governance at the University of Hamburg, visiting fellow at the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law at Cambridge University (September - December...
WPTPN: Civil Society Resistance in Liberal Democracies in a Time of Rising Non-Accountability
This World Politics in a Time of Populist Nationalism (WPTPN) guest post is written by Dr Cynthia Banham, a University of Queensland Post-Doctoral Fellow at the School of Political Science and International Studies. She is also a Visitor at the School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet)...
When Hell Freezes Over—Will Generals (and Admirals) Stop Global Warming and Bring Peace and Human Rights to the Trump White House?
It now looks like the candidate who boasted that he knew more than the generals will be a President who appoints them and asks their advice. There has been considerable criticism of this from those concerned about a concentration of civilian power in the hands of former military brass. This is...
Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word
It's the eternal quandary of thinking about the intersection of international politics and global health: where does Elton John fit in? We now have an answer. It's where we try to understand issues of moral and legal responsibility of an international organization. About a month ago, I wrote about...
The Russians Are Coming (for your language too)
Gone are the good old days when I had to explain what the word ‘yarki’ means to my friends and colleagues (for the record, ‘colorful’, not ‘brilliant’). Now I will have to clarify the complexities of planting child pornography into the computers of oppositional leaders thanks to the re-emergence...
WPTPN: How Vladimir Putin Became the Oracle of the East
This World Politics in a Time of Populist Nationalism (WPTPN) guest post is written by Emily Holland and Hadas Aron, PhD Candidates in Political Science at Columbia University. Holland's research focuses on energy politics, political development, Russian politics and East/Central Europe. Aron...
No More Vietnams? Reforming the Selective Service
When I was young, I dreamed of Italy. Once in a while, my father would pull out the slide projector and show us pictures from his life on a mountain near Colle Isarco, not far from Italy’s border with Austria. He taught me to speak a little in both Italian and German, which I loved. My father,...
WPTPN: Global Cities in a Time of Populist Nationalism
This World Politics in a Time of Populist Nationalism (WPTPN) guest post is written by Fiona B. Adamson, an Associate Professor of International Relations at SOAS, University of London. In the aftermath of the UK Brexit vote, London Mayor Sadiq Khan and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo issued a joint...
Why Do People Buy #Pizzagate?
Pizzagate, the conspiracy theory started by alt-right Twitter which alleged that John Podesta's emails exposed some members of the Democratic party as being part of a DC pizzeria-based child-sex ring, has made its way into Russian social networks. Now some people are convinced of the existence of...