The Qatar crisis threatened to upend Middle East politics. Instead, it fizzled out. That says a lot about international relations, and how to study it. In June 2017, Saudi Arabia and the UAE--along with a few other states--announced a blockade of Qatar. Frustrated...
To commemorate the 70th anniversary of International Organization, the editorial team asked former editors of the journal to reflect on their time overseeing the journal as well as on the most...
Thanks to PTJ, ISQ Online is running a debate about the scope and nature of the 'practice turn' in the study of world politics. The symposium centers around a recent International Studies...
Last week the New America Foundation hosted its launch for an interdisciplinary cybersecurity initiative. I was fortunate enough to be asked to attend and speak, but the real benefit was that I was...
Interview with Daniel Levine.
From https://www.zazzle.com/This is the last in a series of guest posts by Stuart J. Kaufman of the University of Delaware. Stuart advances a long-running dispute with PTJ about whether "what goes on inside people's heads" is relevant to social constructionism. PTJ doesn't think so; Stuart disagrees. The first post can be found here, the second here. You may also download a complete PDF.None of this is intended to deny the importance of structural insights offered by constructivist analysis. The argument, rather, is that “psychology provides the microfoundations for the motives behind...
This is the second in a series of guest posts by Stuart J. Kaufman of the University of Delaware. Stuart advances a long-running dispute with PTJ about whether "what goes on inside people's heads" is relevant to social constructionism. PTJ doesn't think so; Stuart disagrees. The first post can be found here. After the final post, we will make the entire piece available as a PDF -- consider it our first true "working paper" publication.Since each theory begins with a metatheoretical judgment about human nature, I think the place to start looking for insights is in psychology, which focuses on...
I have long been intrigued by Orson Scott Card's typology of relations to the other, as expressed in his novel Speaker for the Dead. I like it so much that I used it as a central part of my argument (in Chapter 2 of this forthcoming edited volume) that the depicted relations between Colonials and cylons in Battlestar Galactica can tell us something about how to construct a more humane social order. But teaching the novel for the umpteenth time in my sci-fi course this week -- it and its prequel Ender's Game have been in every iteration of the course since I wrote the first draft of the...
The new TRIP survey is out. While the overall findings don't hold many surprises, there are some nuggets of interest. We'll have more to say later, but for now I want to call out a particular finding. Every survey asks the question "aside from you, please list four scholars who have produced the most interesting scholarship in the past five years." In some respects, this question functions as a proxy for "most influential," as the list:Is very similar to the one for "four scholars who have had the greatest influence on the field of IR in the past 20 years"; and Contains a few people who,...
[warning: this post and the piece attached to is is only of interest to a handful of academics]The April 2011 issue of International Organization included a very interesting review essay by Orfeo Fioretos entitled "Historical Institutionalism in International Relations." The thrust of Fioretos' argument, developed through a discussion of books ranging from John Ikenberry's After Victory to Abe Newman's Protectors of Privacy, is that international-relations scholarship would benefit from an historical-institutionalist turn. Although I found myself in agreement with the broad claims in the...
In between ultimate frisbee and lying around in bed sick, I managed to attend a workshop on network theory at the International Studies Asssociation. I spent some time there thinking about different things scholars mean when they say they are doing network theory, and what is the value added to IR of this basket of approaches. Here are some tripartite thoughts on the matter, and you can probably guess which approach I'll be taking in my new book.1) Network theory provides a way to describe social relations that are neither hierarchies nor markets. This approach is associated with Margaret...
[Note: This post is almost entirely "inside baseball" for IR academics.]For this year's ISA conference I was supposed to write a paper called "The Constructivism That Wasn't: On the Non-Inevitability of Sociological Liberalism." The idea was that I would go back and carefully reconstruct those moments of historical contingency in which an alternative IR constructivism -- one which did not so neatly track with sociological liberalism, roughly defined as the notion that individuals' thoughts and beliefs shape their behavior an thus the social world that they inhabit -- might have emerged. The...