Some political-science lab leaks are more difficult to control than others.
How Can We Vaccinate Against Viral Political Science?
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Month: August 2021
The Democratic Peace isn’t a Virus
Paul Musgrave has written an important piece discussing how ideas developed within academia can have profoundly negative effects when they escape into the wild of the policymaking world....
Political-Science Lab Leaks: a Symposium
Today we're kicking off a new symposium on Paul Musgrave's Foreign Policy article, "Political Science Has Its Own Lab Leaks." In it, Musgrave likens academic disciplines to labs; academic theories...
Will Afghanistan Hurt U.S. Credibility?
What we know about reputation and credibility doesn’t track with the claims of doomsayers. But it also doesn’t accord with those who argue that there’s “nothing to see here.”
More Month: August 2021 Posts
6+1 Questions about “Rethinking causal explanation in interpretive international studies”
Ludvig Norman answers 6+1 questions about causal inference in interpretative scholarship
They do not don what they hoist
Always attack. Even in defense, attack. The attacking arm possesses the initiative and thus commands the action. To attack makes men brave; to defend makes them timorous. Steven Pressfield, The Virtues of War Does America even know where is it heading? Fictitiously yes. Geopolitically no. So it does not admit the fact that it lost the war, the region, and the moral compass on civility. And nothing captures this more than the odd official military practice that reversed the American flag itself. Following the 9/11 attacks, the US embarked on a new worldwide mission: A Global War on Terror. As...
How Tunisia Could still be the Arab Spring* Success** Story
Everyone is (rightly) thinking about Afghanistan, but I'm still thinking of Tunisia. Each fall I teach a Middle East politics class. And each fall I end our discussion on the Arab Spring with a debate over whether the Arab Spring actually mattered. Most students end up arguing that it didn't, or that its overall effects were negative. But they exclude Tunisia from this gloomy picture; they see it as the success story. This came to mind as reports have emerged that Kais Saied, Tunisia's President, has indefinitely extended his emergency powers, which effectively concentrates all power in his...
Why Addressing the Climate Crisis Can Help Build More Sustainable Peace
Climate change poses substantial national, international and human security risks, but analysts have only recently shifted their focus toward how to simultaneously build peace in post-conflict environments and grapple with the dual challenges of mitigating and adapting to climate change.
The Politics of “Defeat”
We’re in the middle of a political struggle to define “defeat” in Afghanistan. What does that mean?
Disentangling the Disaster in Afghanistan
This is a tragedy, but not for the reasons some think. The day after the Taliban seized Kabul, Afghanistan's capital, I received a few media inquiries. I said it's horrible that the Taliban have taken over the country, but it was also inevitable; it's unlikely a sustained US presence would have led to any other outcome. At the same time, there is no excuse for the Biden Administration's apparent failure to plan for the withdrawal, especially concerning the safety of Afghans who had worked with the United States. I got the sense that wasn't what they were expecting to hear. They wanted to...
Episode 8 : Marwa Daoudy discusses Syria and Climate Change
Jarrod talks with Professor Marwa Daoudy about her new book, The Origins of The Syrian Conflict: Climate Change and Human Security (Cambridge, 2020).
6+1 Questions about Following the Leader: International Order, Alliance Strategies, and Emulation
Raymond Kuo answers 6 (+1) questions about his 2021 book on why the institutional design of alliances changes over time.