In the vein of recent graduations everywhere and the exams students had to take to get there, and thinking there is now ample evidence out there to get closer to winding up a debate that has raged in both policy and academic circles, let's keep in succinct: "Fukuyama...
OK, its confession time. I don't really agree with them much, but I loved reading the post-Cold War 'blockbusters' of Samuel Huntington, Francis Fukuyama and John Mearsheimer, (all beautifully...
As part of a forthcoming project to re-assess the analytical relevance of the concept of the "praetorian state" in contemporary South Asian and Middle Eastern politics, I've been fascinated by...
I do not see the discussions about zombies as a type of new or out-of-the-box thinking. If anything, the discussions of zombies that I have noted so far are completely "in-the-box" thinking, except...
Dan Drezner and Bill have both flagged Randy Schweller’s new piece in National Interest. I’ve just finished reading the piece and I agree with them – it’s really a depressing read. But, it’s the type of piece that we see periodically – it tries to take stock of the state of the global politics and IR scholars’ understanding of it. In many way, it reads a lot like Mearsheimer’s “Why We Will Miss the Cold War” or Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations?” It aims high and tries to explain large systemic events by using a lot of broad generalizations to develop the core argument that we live in a...
I actually did watch the SOTU on Tuesday, in part because there was nothing else on television, and in part because I figured it might be a good topic to discuss in class. Wednesday night I was the substitute teacher for a colleague's graduate seminar on the Domestic Sources of US Foreign Policy. We ended up talking about the ideals that put the "American" in American Foreign Policy, and the assigned reading for the day was Samuel Huntington's 1982 article "American Ideals versus American Institutions." We put Huntington's article here for two reasons: First, its great for generating...
On Monday, Slate ran a three-part book review by Bill Emmott and Fareed Zakaria in which they discuss Ian Bremmer's new book The J-Curve, which purports to explain the difficulties of political transitions. Now I have not read the book, but this discription of Bremmer's thesis struck me:Bremmer's argument is that history shows that the most stable countries are often also the most closed: North Korea, Cuba, China under Mao, Soviet Russia. But as countries become more open, they generally become more unstable in the first instance, as existing institutions are challenged and undermined, and...