On an ice-cold winter evening I arrived in Moscow to untangle the riddle that is Russia. After reading two op-eds by Anne Applebaum and Bill Browder I knew what this country was about but I just wanted to see it for myself. The eyes of the border control guards...
Sting said it best What kind of questions do you usually expect from a Town Hall meeting in the US? Healthcare? Climate change? Pensions? Schools? Roads? You would be surprised, but these are also...
rent interviews Professor Cameron Thies of Arizona State University and the current President of the International Studies Association. Cameron talks about growing up in...
Four years ago I accepted a job at a university in the UK. When I took the job I didn’t think a whole lot about how working in the UK might differ from my previous academic posts in the US. I’m an...
I had a piece in the Washington Post's "Monkeycage" over the weekend, which you can read here. I noted that many worry Saudi Arabia and the UAE will pull America into war with Iran. But it actually looks like they're the ones restraining us. The piece was inspired by the famous "chain-ganging" dynamic in IR scholarship, but there was little discussion of that as it was geared towards a broader audience, so I wanted to expand here. I suspect most readers of this site had to read Christensen and Snyder's "Chain gangs and passed bucks" at some point. In case you didn't, the argument is...
Today, Ryan Crocker--career foreign service officer and former Ambassador to Iraq and Afghanistan--wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post criticizing its criticism of the Afghanistan war he oversaw. He pointed to progress made in Afghanistan, which is fair (and doesn't necessarily contradict anything in the Post's reporting), but generally did little to directly undermine worries about the war. Beyond that, as I noted in a frustrated Twitter thread earlier today, he showed off a lot of what's wrong with US foreign policy. I spent 11 years in Washington, DC, doing the usual young professional...
This is a guest post from Dr. Sybille Reinke de Buitrago, who is a Researcher and Project Manager of “VIDEOSTAR – Video-based Strategies Against Radicalization” at PolAk Nds, the Academy of Police Science and Criminology, Germany. Her research focuses on processes of identity, perception, emotions and discourse in security policy and international relations. With the multitude of ‘stuff’ anyone can say online, why does it matter what someone says? It depends. When it comes to extremists posting content, we should be concerned, because spreading hatred online can incite actual violence....