J. Patrick Rhamey Jr. is Associate Professor in the Department of International Studies and Political Science at the Virginia Military Institute. He also serves on the board of the TransResearch Consortium, an international group of scholars focusing on global transitions driven by power relations and demographic shifts. His academic work focuses on global hierarchy, comparative regionalism, and the international politics of sport. With Tadeusz...
It's been a rough week for John Mearsheimer. He has come under a barrage of criticism for his claim that Russia's aggression towards Ukraine is the West's fault. His theoretical tradition, realism, has also come under fire, for producing not only (arguably) bad policy takes but policy takes that don't seem to flow from the theory itself. Does this mean that all of realism is flawed? I would argue no, by pointing to another target of such...
Exercising feminist curiosity: how Ukraine women are involved in the conflict and how Putin’s nationalist fever dream is a patriarchal one.
I excitedly read this recent tweet by Evan Perkoski of UConn, about a new article he co-authored that has been accepted in International Organization. Beyond being glad for a colleague's success, I was excited by the substance of the publication. They produced a new dataset on violent non-state actors and analyzed the conditions under which they cooperated, finding a major role for both group ideology and religious identity. That is huge!...
The academy is traditionally a place students and scholars go to hone their critical faculties. But perhaps, in some cases, we take this critical approach too far. In this Quack-and-Forth, Adam B. Lerner and Jarrod Hayes discuss academic grudges and whether the academy would be a kinder or gentler place if we all acted a bit more like Larry Bird (and a bit less like Larry David).
After a two-year COVID-induced hiatus, the International Studies Association Online Media Caucus (OMC) is pleased to announce the return of the Duckies! Please send you nominations to onlinemediacaucus@gmail.com by February 25, 2022. We encourage self-nominations. Note that the OMC has updated the awards to reflect the current topography of the online media environment. We now award Duckies in the following categories: Best Blog...
Peter F. Trumbore is Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Oakland University in Rochester, MI, and currently serves as Chair of the International Studies Association Online Media Caucus (OMC). He received his Ph.D in 1999 from the University of Connecticut after spending nearly a decade as a newspaper editor. His research falls into the broad categories of international conflict and conflict management, and foreign...
This piece is the second in a three-part series grappling with the role of political economy in making a just, sustainable international order. Writing about America’s economic strategy deficit got me pondering why the United States had such a stunted economic imagination. How could the government that many consider to be the global economic hegemon be inept at economic statecraft? For one thing, I think the popular impression of America as...
I wrote the first draft of “What’s it Like to Be a State?” sometime in late 2017, during an unusual time in both my personal life and my research career. I was about halfway through my PhD at the University of Cambridge and was feeling both immensely homesick and quite bored—trapped in a small town that felt ripped from the Victorian era. I filled my free time watching large numbers of pre-recorded NBA games and, also, for some reason, reading philosophy of mind….
I appreciate this opportunity to remark on Adam Lerner’s (hereafter, just ‘Adam’), excellent 2020 International Theory article on state consciousness. I recall first chatting with Adam about this paper when it was still in development, over a coffee in Prague at the 2018 European International Studies Association (EISA) annual meeting. Some of what I’ll mention here will be a rehashing – but also rethinking – of what I told him then. To...
state takes precedence over their own lives. Focusing on states as persons distracts us from how violence travels across levels of analysis. States don’t do violence to one another. They inflict violence on actual living beings.
Alexandria Innes is a researcher in the Violence and Society Centre at City, University of London, and a lecturer in International Politics. Alexandria specialises in the international politics of migration. Theoretically, her research is situated at the intersection of migration studies and critical security studies in International Relations. Her current project contributes to the Violence, Health and Society Consortium, funded by the UK...