Charles A. Dainoff, Robert M. Farley, and Geoffrey F. Williams answer questions about their new book
Charles A. Dainoff, Robert M. Farley, and Geoffrey F. Williams answer questions about their new book
Decolonial methods, and the bringing of attention to race in knowledge production is necessarily historical. It demands a close re-reading of archives, forgotten texts, and sometimes “canonical” works. As a result, through this special issue and the wider work the authors build upon, we now have a very different understanding of the historical entanglements of race and international affairs knowledge.
Now that the myth of “theory-practice gap” has been largely refuted what role might IR and journals like International Affairs play in crafting a “reparative praxis”?
The International Affairs Centenary Special Issue on “Race and Imperialism in International Relations: Theory and Practice” was published two years ago in the aftermath of the global Black Lives Matter movement; it marked an atypical period of introspection by many scholars, departments, and journals of International Relations on the general paucity of attention given to matters of race and imperialism in IR research and teaching.
Not many know that Trump was on the verge of publicly announcing U.S. withdrawal from the alliance at the 2018 summit. Congress would have prevented a formal end to U.S. membership, but Trump’s announcement itself would have caused irreparable damage. Why then did Trump change his position on NATO in 2019? And why was NATO, at least in military terms, in better state when Trump left office than when he began his term?
The United States has repeatedly used its military to overthrow foreign regimes – at least sixteen times from 1906 to 2011 – but these interventions seldom work out particularly well. So why does Washington continue to engage in violent regime change? The answer is that US leaders forcibly overthrow regimes to relieve emotional frustration.
Name Of The Book… And Its Coordinates? Jennifer D. Sciubba, ed. 2021. A Research Agenda for Political Demography (Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, Massachusetts, USA: Edward Elgar) What’s the Argument? We cannot understand contemporary international relations without understanding the demographic shifts going on around the world. Demographics – the characteristics of populations, such as age and location – are not just a backdrop for other, supposedly more important, forces. Population plays a key role in the outcomes of armed conflict, economic development, and political reform....
Financial hegemony brings with it substantial benefits, most notably reserve currency status. In order to successfully compete, rising powers need to lure financial institutions away from incumbent powers. They often try to make themselves more attractive to international finance by removing longstanding financial regulations.
WHAT’S THE NAME OF THE BOOK? Gregorio Bettiza. 2019. Finding Faith in Foreign Policy: Religion and American Diplomacy in a Postsecular World (New York, Oxford University Press) WHAT’S THE ARGUMENT? Since the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy has increasingly “desecularized,” such that it is now deeply intertwined with religious agendas, interests, and organizations. We see this trend in efforts to advance international religious freedom, mobilize faith-based actors for humanitarian and development purposes, fight global terrorism by promoting ‘moderate Islam,' and solve...
Name of the Book Justin Schon. 2020. Surviving the War in Syria: Survival Strategies in a Time of Conflict. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). What’s the Argument? Civilians in conflict zones face a range of threats and opportunities. They adopt survival strategies that reflect how they perceive those threats – where they come from, how severe they are, what options exist to respond to them – and what opportunities they believe are available to them. People with advantaged social status, wasta in Syria, typically see more opportunities to take action. The key thing is that they don’t...
Ludvig Norman answers 6+1 questions about causal inference in interpretative scholarship
Raymond Kuo answers 6 (+1) questions about his 2021 book on why the institutional design of alliances changes over time.