Even when Latin Americans are allowed to speak, IR scholars and practitioners do not listen to them due to the language in which they produce knowledge, epistemic violence and access barriers.
Christopher Clary on his new book, which looks at why international rivalry is a hard habit to break.
The Qatar crisis threatened to upend Middle East politics. Instead, it fizzled out. That says a lot about international relations, and how to study it. In June 2017, Saudi Arabia and the UAE--along...
In 2018 and 2019, two Boeing 737 MAX planes crashed, killing 346 people hailing from 36 different countries across the globe. Now, some of the families who lost loved ones are challenging in U.S....
In an attempt to distract myself from the thought that today my small university town will be overrun by 900 frat boys who went to Northern Italy on a skiing vacation despite the Dutch government’s warning, let’s discuss something that might have gone under the radar – future changes to the Russian Constitution. Amid a global pandemic what could be better than voting in a Referendum? Only voting for a President, amirite? But let’s start from the beginning. Mid-January Russian President Vladimir Putin suddenly announced that the Russian Constitution might need some freshening up....
The following is a guest post by Andrew Leber, a PhD candidate in Government at Harvard University. The death of Sultan Qaboos bin Said, and the succession of Haitham bin Tariq as the country’s new ruler, was yet one more high-profile news item this year amid the back-and-forth attacks and tragic consequences of events further up the Gulf. Yet for the world of political science, this transition calls to mind important questions for comparativists about authoritarian successions in particular and authoritarian institutions more general. Thinking about Authoritarian SuccessionWhen are...
Depending on your Twitter addiction, you either went to sleep or woke up with the news that America had assassinated Qassim Suleimani, the commander of Iran's Quds force. Suleimani was one of the most powerful men in Iran, and the driver of its activities in the Middle East, so this is a big deal. People are debating whether this was just and necessary, and what happens next. But I wanted to raise a different point: what this means for America's Persian Gulf allies. Many would suspect these states--particularly Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE)--to be the biggest winners in...
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 reflected the thousand years of Russia’s repressive regime. I was half-expecting the KGB to arrest me there and then because four years ago I posted on Facebook that I didn’t like Vlad, but they let me through. My Moscow adventure had begun. The shadow of Stalin still looms large over this sprawling city. As soon as you approach the...
Fieldwork – “leaving one’s home institution in order to acquire data, information, or insights that significantly inform one’s research”(Kapiszewski, MacLean, and Read 2015: 1) – has long been a cornerstone of social science research. It is a remarkably diverse enterprise: ‘doing fieldwork’ can mean carrying out archival research, interviews, surveys, focus groups, participant observation, ethnography, or experiments. Fieldwork is also quite valuable: it helps orient scholars toward under-addressed ontological questions, including whether many of the concepts that we routinely study actually...
So by this point we all know the big news on Syria. Overnight, Trump announced that--after consulting with Turkish President Erdogan--the US would be pulling troops out of north Syria, giving Turkey freedom to operate. This would likely involve military actions against Kurdish forces there, which Turkey fears are coordinating with Kurdish insurgents in Turkey. This is concerning for two reasons. First, the United States had worked with these Kurdish forces to fight ISIS, so we're basically abandoning them. Second, this will basically leave ISIS detention camps unguarded, possibly letting...
The other day, Emily McFarlan Miller--a journalist with Religion News Service--noted a sense of deja vu. The AP had an article on a delegation of US evangelicals who travelled to Saudi Arabia to meet with Mohammed bin Salman, the country's Crown Prince (and effective ruler). The deja vu was because there was a similar delegation--with some of the same individuals--last year, which she wrote about at the time. These repeated visits, and the visitors' response to the conservative Islamic Kingdom, are surprising, and may represent a shift in how evangelical elites view Saudi Arabia. The 2018...
This is a guest post from Ben-zion Telefus. He holds a Ph.D. from Bar-Ilan University (2015), where he researched the war on drugs in the US and the EU foreign and security policies. Follow him on Twitter @BenzionTelefus When Israelis vote in the coming September 17th re-run elections the issue on the ballot will remain the same: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's political and legal future. Netanyahu’s control over Israel for the past decade led many to describe him as a sophisticated "Machiavellian" politician who mastered every available means to ensure his political power. Yet using the...