126 countries now publish a national security strategy or defense document, and 45 of these feature
a leaders’ preambles. How these talk about the world, or not, is surprisingly revealing of historical
global strategic hierarchies.
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Andrew Neal
Andrew W. Neal is Professor of International Security at the University of Edinburgh. His most recent monograph is Security as Politics: Beyond the State of Exception (Edinburgh University Press, 2019). He is currently working on a project to collect and analyse all national security strategies in the world, and another on North Sea critical infrastructure protection.
6+1 Questions about Between Mao and Gandhi: The Social Roots of Civil Resistance
What is the name of the book? Ches Thurber. 2021. Between Mao and Gandhi: The Social Roots of Civil Resistance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. What’s the argument? Variation in their social ties helps explain why some dissident organizations embrace the “nonviolent” strategy of civil resistance while others reject it, often turning instead to guns. The logic of civil resistance is predicated on the idea that by using primarily...
Ches Thurber
Ches Thurber is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Northern Illinois University. His scholarship examines the spectrum of global conflict with specific interests in civil resistance, civil wars, and civil-military relations. He is the author of Between Mao and Gandhi: the Social Roots of Civil Resistance. Other work has been published in International Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Peace Research, Conflict Management and Peace...
Huss Banai
Huss Banai of Indiana University is an individual Brent considers himself incredibly fortunate to call a friend. He joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast to tell his amazing story and journey through life and academia. Huss was born in Iran and grew up in Northern Tehran until his family moved to Canada when he was 15. In Iran, Huss and his family experienced the war with Iraq, the fallout from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (his father worked...
To the Grand Peace Strategist
If international relations as a field is to have a just purpose—not just justifying the power-hoarding and power-wielding of a ruling class—it needs more concepts to critique power, relate policy to peaceful ends, and surface rather than shroud the price that others pay for what our states do in the world. Most IR scholars imagine ourselves toiling on behalf of the greater good. But if the policy implications of our work rationalizes more...
Erica Resende
Dr. Erica Simone Almeida Resende of the Brazilian War College joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast. Erica grew up in Brazil but, as she phrases it, 'in between worlds'. There was her Brazilian home, and there was her German school, which she explains has situated her as a sort of 'bridge' moving between the Global North and Global South. Erica went to law school and worked for a law firm in the 1990s, but changed gears and pursued graduate degrees...
Susan Sell: Speaking Truth to Power
This is the fourth post in our series of remembrances on the late Susan Sell. Susan and I were both conducting research in Geneva in the summer of 2022, she was at the World Trade Organization, and I was working in the archives at the International Committee of the Red Cross. Our hotels were right next to each other, so we met up one night and walked along Lake Geneva into town looking for a place for dinner. As we sat down, Susan, in her...
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 the Battle of Bannockburn, and never lose their desire for independence. Observers of UK politics, who assume Scottish independence is dead, would be well-served to re-read this poem. Why some are writing off Scottish independence In a recent article...
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 strategically) was very influential in my personal intellectual development, I don’t want to say something about that. The thing I want to say about Susan is that she was the antithesis to so many of the negative tendencies that you can see in...
Joseph O’Mahoney
Joseph O'Mahoney is currently Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Reading. He has also been a Stanton Fellow at MIT and taught at Seton Hall's School of Diplomacy and Brown University. He received a PhD in Political Science from George Washington University.
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 Susan was to me, both professionally and personally. It’s especially hard since Susan is pretty much the reason why I have a career in academia. So, I’ll write about the second time I met Susan. It was April 2013. I was nine months into my first...