Why Would Putin Sabotage Nord Stream?
Initial speculation about Nord Stream reveals both the strengths and limitations of using international-relations models to make sense of unfolding events
Making Sense of “Rules-Based” Anti-Liberalism
Dozens of regimes around the world are anti-liberal—autocratic to varying degrees—but also big...
What makes for a successful conference?
Like many, I’ve finally gotten back on schedule after the American Political Science...
New
Featured
Alexander Barder
Professor Alexander Barder joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast. Dr. Barder was born in Paris,...
Episode 25: The New Hierarchy Studies
Scholars of international relations don’t agree on much, but they at least agree that anarchy (th…
Patricia Owens
Professor Patricia Owens joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast. Professor Owens grew up in London,...
Recent
Antagonistic Trust, Asian Insecurity, and “Strategic” Competition
I was on a refreshingly contrarian panel recently as part of Victoria Forum, this big shindig in...
The More Things Change…
Some more excerpts from G. Loews Dickinson’s writings on international affairs.
Our syllabi should be full of surprises
It’s no surprise that current events regularly lead us to update our syllabi. That doesn’t mean we can’t make “surprise” an important feature of our courses.
ACADEME
Five Lessons for responsible engagement when the world is on fire
Waves of global crises have generated challenges in nearly every corner of human life....
What Walt and Mearsheimer Get Wrong About the Security Dilemma
The security dilemma plays a central role in Walt and Mearsheimer’s reading of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But what if they get the security dilemma wrong?
6+1 Questions about Social Positioning and International Order Contestation in Early Modern Southeast Asia
Rather than accept subordination to the Ming and Qing, Southeast Asian states contested Chinese international ordering in the early modern period.
6+1 Questions about The Difficult Policies of Peace: Rivalry in Modern South Asia
Christopher Clary on his new book, which looks at why international rivalry is a hard habit to break.
Subfields
The Qatar crisis ends…in the most boring way possible
The Qatar crisis threatened to upend Middle East politics. Instead, it fizzled out. That says a...
How international organizations can resist political shocks
As long as international organizations have existed their relationships with their member states...
To Fear or Love Multipolarity?
The global distribution of material power changes from time to time. It’s something that happens,...
Geopolitical Rivalry: Great for Princes, Bad for Paupers
If you’ve spent any amount of time in Washington, there’s a good chance you’ve internalized a...
The Boeing 737 Max Settlement: An American “Solution” to an International Disaster?
In 2018 and 2019, two Boeing 737 MAX planes crashed, killing 346 people hailing from 36 different...
Textbook Reactionary Populism
I recently posted a piece at Lawyers, Guns and Money about Jonathan Swan’s two-part...
Podcasts
🎧 Podcasts
Topics
Partnered Engagement: A New Form of Ethical Policy Engagement
What happens when a research subject becomes a research and briefing partner? In 2017, I was...
Why Land Acknowledgements?
The ISA statement lacks not only comparative history but also local historical depth. It also distorts moral responsibility.
Sunflower seeds and Molotov cocktails
Exercising feminist curiosity: how Ukraine women are involved in the conflict and how Putin’s nationalist fever dream is a patriarchal one.
Conscious States in a World of Make Believe
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….
Failing Upwards and Global Elitism
Matt Hancock, a Conservative MP and the UK’s Health Secretary during most of the Covid lockdowns, has failed upwards.
Duck of Minerva Roundup*
What’s been quacking at the blog? The Duck of Minerva opened for business in 2005, so...
Talking Great-Power Competition in the Heart of Empires Past
It turns out that it’s hard to write a roundup of happenings at the Duck of Minerva when there...
Was anarchy always what states made of it?
Like a lot of academics, I love Google n-grams, but not as much as the digitized archive Google...