Under the Paris Agreement, states submit Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) outlining their commitments to reducing emissions. These documents are important window in the international politicization of climate change policy.
Initial speculation about Nord Stream reveals both the strengths and limitations of using international-relations models to make sense of unfolding events
I was on a refreshingly contrarian panel recently as part of Victoria Forum, this big shindig in Canada (at University of Victoria in British Columbia, not to be confused with Victoria University of...
Rather than accept subordination to the Ming and Qing, Southeast Asian states contested Chinese international ordering in the early modern period.
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...
This is a guest post from Erika Weinthal, a Professor at Duke University and Jeannie Sowers, an Associate Professor at the University of New Hampshire What is often referred to as environmental peacebuilding – the process of governing and leveraging the use of the environment and natural resources for building a sustainable peace through improving livelihoods, strengthening the economy, rebuilding trust, and fostering cooperation – has been a core component of US-supported projects in Israel and Palestine. As part of the US government strategy to promote a two-state solution in the aftermath...
This is a guest post from Brent Sasley, Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Arlington. He tweets at @besasley. Israel holds a prominent place in the American popular imagination. It’s a major source of news reports, as well as an increasingly partisan issue in American electoral politics. Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that American journalists and western journalists more generally seek out American and western analysts and academics for commentary on Israeli politics, such as the recent election. On Twitter I suggested that western journalists look beyond western...