It's a nostalgia episode for our two hosts, Patrick and Dan. They tackle Mustafa Emirbayer's 1997 article in the American Journal of Sociology, "Manifesto for a Relational Sociology." According to Emirbayer, "Sociologists today are faced with a fundamental dilemma: whether to conceive of the social world as consisting primarily in substances or processes, in static 'things' or in dynamic, unfolding relations." Was...
What follows is my general philosophy on China issues, by way of answering the hardest of hard defense framing questions regarding China. After my most recent piece in Foreign Affairs, I got a note from a semi-prominent friend in Washington's foreign policy community basically praising it but also posing some tough questions about China policy. In my view they're the wrong questions. But we've known each other a long time, and my...
Election observation is at a turning point. Roughly 80-85% of elections around the world are subject to election observation. The majority of these are in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. While international election observation is important for democracy promotion and electoral integrity, it has undermined the agency of those being observed. A growing push for domestic observers highlights the importance of local involvement, expertise and...
nna Kapambwe Mwaba is an assistant professor of Government at Smith College where she is also affiliated with the African Studies program. Mwaba was a McPherson/Eveillard Postdoctoral Fellow in Government from 2019-2021. She earned her doctorate in political science from the University of Florida, Gainesville, with concentrations in comparative politics and international relations. Her research focuses on African agency and the role of African...
What's the title? Latham, Andrew., 2022. Medieval Sovereignty, ARC Humanities Press. It argues that? A series of thirteenth-century contests over the locus and character of supreme authority in Latin Christendom provided the conceptual raw materials that later thinkers ultimately assembled into the early modern constitutive norm of “sovereignty.” So why should we care? It seeks to counter the tendency of scholars in the field of IR to...
Justin Casey and I have a new piece at Foreign Affairs. We discuss the debate about whether or not modern reactionary populism is a variant of fascism (maybe) and whether the dynamics of fascism during the Interwar period holds any lessons for the present (probably). Check it out.
My most recent Foreign Affairs article, co-authored with Justin Casey, landed yesterday. The article started out as an argument about how the normalization of the far right might affect national and international security. Those issues remain a major thread, but the true heart of the piece is a discussion of the dynamics of the transnational right during the 1920s and 1930s (that is,...
Andrew Latham is a professor of international relations and political theory at Macalester College, Saint Paul, MN; a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities, Washington, DC; and a regular opinion contributor at The Hill newspaper.
My partner used to refer to Worf as the Klingon equivalent of a Kantian. The Klingon-centric episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: DS9 make clear that Worf is committed to a deontological interpretation of Klingon ethics. If you're still reading this, you likely know that, first, Klingon ethics and morality are built around personal honor and, second, Worf was raised by humans. Because he spent his youth without much, if...
Professor Ann Towns of the University of Gothenburg visits the Hayseed Scholar podcast. Professor Towns grew up in Sweden, and was interested in playing music and especially performing classical music as a child. But by the time she was in high school, she wanted to broaden her horizons, and get out of not only her town but Sweden. That led her to Kansas, where she finished high school in an exchange program. She lived outside of a small town,...
The Biden administration’s jarring revisionism on economic policy toward China (and by extension the world) is reviving discussions (most acute during the Trump and George W. Bush years) about whether it’s right to label the United States a revisionist power. There’s a lot at stake in whether the United States is perceived as—or actually is—a “revisionist” (vice “status quo”) power. Theories predicting war are built out of...
Over at Lawyers, Guns & Money, Cheryl Rofer raises concerns about the possibility that STRATCOM is trying, per Defense News, to “furiously” rewrite U.S. deterrence strategy Writing “a new nuclear deterrence theory” is not a college essay. Nor can it “furiously” be done overnight, as if that essay were due tomorrow. The nuclear deterrent, which is what people like Richard often call the nuclear arsenal, has never deterred smaller wars....