Like millions of other people around the world, I have spent much of the past few weeks playing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (TotK), the nineteenth installment in Nintendo’s widely acclaimed series.
In this installment of “Whiskey Optional,” Stacie Goddard (Wellesley), Evelyn Goh (Australian Nat…
Professor Harman joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast. She starts off discussing with Brent her childhood and growing up on a farm in Buckinghamshire in SE England, her interests and aspirations during...
Divorces don’t usually send shockwaves through the global policy field. They almost never create uncertainty about the health of hundreds of millions of people. The split between Bill and Melinda...
Sorry, clickbait! But admit, it, after an apology of race science in Quillette or “The Case for Colonialism” in TWQ you probably rage-clicked on the thumbnail to let me have it. Periodic IR Twitter flares over teaching "Stoddard light" (i.e., Huntington) also show that not all scholars are aware of racialized origins of world order, existing color lines in global capitalism, or even “race relations” pedigree of IR as a discipline. This post is about a case for teaching about nationalism because it seems like different versions of racist primordial rhetoric just won’t die. As a blog post by...
Alex Montgomery I have a new post up at Foreign Policy arguing that "The Bells" - and audience reactions to it - tell us something about American attitudes toward just war theory. A relevant topic with rising tensions w/ Iran, a debate over whether to pardon war criminals, and the stated willingness of our own rulers to violate war law. The underlying reason for the outcry went unspoken: The deliberate targeting of civilians from the air, using incendiary weapons that are impossible to escape, is rightly recognized by Americans as a terrible crime—something good actors just don’t do. Our...
Much ink has been spilled since last Sunday about the massacre at King’s Landing. Why did Dany carpet-bomb a civilian population after a city had surrendered? Was this a sign of her growing madness? Or a rational strategy to cement the legitimacy of her claim? Why didn’t the showrunners build it up better? Did they compromise Dany’s story arc as a civilian-protection advocate or were her actions always foreshadowed by her worst “fire and blood” tantrums? In the handwringing over what Daenerys did, scant analysis has focused on how she did it. This is important since audiences draw inferences...
I assigned Plato’s Theaetetus this semester in my foreign policy class. It was the very first thing we read in a course that included more standard text’s like Walter Russel Mead’s Special Providence, Tom Schelling’s Arms and Influence, and selections from Andrew Bacevich’s edited volume of primary sources, Ideas and American Foreign Policy. On first glance, reading a work of political philosophy—and one which is widely considered one of the more difficult texts in the Western canon—might seem like a poor fit. But, my experiment paid off and I may continue assigning the Theaetetus or similar...
One thing that Trump hasn't done today yet (which he should have if he wants to stay in Putin's good graces) was to congratulate Russians with Victory day. It's an incredibly important holiday in contemporary Russia and its commemoration dynamic can help understand a large chunk of Russian foreign policy. The specificity of Russian collective memory of the Great Patriotic War has been a key factor shaping society’s response to the “fascism” media frame, especially when it comes to the "Near Abroad". For a number of reasons, the memory of the war is especially immediate and emotionally...
"Servant of the People" The history of the Next President Cue in the Twitter hot-takes in which Ukrainians elected themselves “a TV show star” with “no political experience”. Relax, not all TV stars are racist ignoramuses who want wall and try to spoon state flags. Despite winning the elections with a whopping 73% (and beating his own onscreen presidential score in his hit TV show), this one is different. If you grew up in post-Soviet Russia you already know Ukraine’s incoming president – Volodymir Zelensky. He was a regular on the Soviet Union's stand-up comedy show KVN (Club of Funny and...
I saw this tweet and could not help but respond: I enjoyed @mchorowitz on GoT Dragon airpower, but it’s time for @RyanGrauer to give the people what they want- an analysis of how Westerosi alliance politics will affect military command structure and battlefield effectiveness. — Jon Askonas (@JonAskonas) April 15, 2019 Given that I have written about both Game of Thrones and alliance politics, I have to enter this discussion. Spoilers dwell below as we get into this: Alliances are always fraught with suspicion and doubt. Glenn Snyder wrote about the alliance dilemma--that allies will...
by Anonymous US National Security expert, as part of a new series of posts providing insights into the policy-making process Sir:Per your request at the 0500 stand-up, I have compiled the full set of analogies developed to wrap around the pending National Military Strategy. Staff were told to supply a framework analogy appropriate for supporting the following: Because we cannot be certain when, where, or under what conditions the next fight will occur, the Joint Force must maintain an [insert analogy] stance—with the strength, agility, endurance, resilience, flexibility, and awareness to...