On 7 January, US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents opened fire on Renee Goode, killing her. To be honest, I wanted to write a post on just how sad and terrifying this murder was. How wrong it is that ICE agents are targeting opposition-led cities and...
I had high hopes for director Kathryn Bigelow’s House of Dynamite, a new Netflix movie about U.S. nuclear command and control. There’s so much potential for cinema to unpack the dilemmas and...
Over two decades have passed since the horrifying 9/11 attacks. Do we have a consensus understanding of the radicalization process in communities that supported or filled the ranks of jihadist...
I dislike the term “soft power.” We owe the term to the late, great Joseph Nye. He popularized it in his 1990 book, Bound to Lead. Nye’s book was, first and foremost, an intervention in the...
On Easter Monday, Pope Francis died at the age of 88. His passing marked the end of a 12-year papacy characterized by a commitment to the poor, an insistence on peace over posturing, and an often-controversial emphasis on mercy over rules. As white smoke issues from the Vatican--indicating a new pope has been chosen--most commentary has focused on familiar terrain: his views on women, LGBTQ+ rights, his political moderation, his Latin American identity, or his climate advocacy. But for all the ink spilled over Francis’s social teachings, one of the most strategically relevant elements of his...
With the news avalanche that is Trump, it’s hard to keep track of all the outrageous things he says and does. With his recent very vocal attempts at land grabs (that we are not entirely sure will stay rhetorical) that are already being normalized in both right-wing and mainstream media, it’s important to look back at what is at the heart of Trump’s political philosophy that he himself doesn't realize. Breaking Point Carnival is hardly the term that comes up often in foreign policy, but Mikhail Bakhtin has helped understand the mechanism of populism. Carnival is about norm-breaking and...
As someone who studies terrorism and religion, I approach each Christmas with dread due to the possibility of terrorist attacks around the holiday. A string of bombings hit churches in Indonesia and the Philippines in 2000, killing over 40. In 2016, someone drove a truck through a Christmas market in Berlin, killing a dozen. And just a few weeks ago, German police foiled an attempted attack on a Bavarian Christmas market. Each of these involved Islamist extremists, either organized through al-Qaeda or ISIS or lone radicalized individuals. While we rarely got a full manifesto, it is...
Like many who follow the Middle East, a lot has been going through my head since the civil war there suddenly reignited and Bashar al-Assad's regime even more suddenly fell. Will the victims of his persecution now get justice? Will this weaken Russia and Iran in the region? Is the Islamist group that's now in charge, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, as moderate as they claim? Will this make things worse for the Middle East's already beleaguered Christians? One question that keeps coming to the fore for me, however, has to do with US foreign policy discussions about ten years ago. The civil war was...
We’re living in a world where policymakers are playing Russian roulette with our lives and calling it “stability.” We need to think differently about nukes and the risks of war. Specifically, we need to recognize that the projects of peacemaking and nuclear stability are fundamentally linked. Peace advocates rightly abhor nuclear weapons, but tend to simply refuse the various concepts that occupy the nuke-bro imaginary. Although I totally get it and sympathize, those nuke-bro concepts are a language spoken by people wielding power. Deployed and critiqued the right way, they can have...
On October 23rd, militants attacked a Turkish aerospace facility near the capital of Ankara. The Turkish government blamed the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK)--a Kurdish insurgent group--and launched retaliatory airstrikes. It is very plausible that the PKK is behind this, given the group's history. But the group has also tellingly not claimed responsibility for the attack, and the Turkish government has an incentive to blame the group. Thankfully, terrorism studies scholars have looked into whether and when groups claim attack, and that may give us some insight into what happened here. The...
“A specter is haunting strategic studies—the specter of peace.” These bizarre words are from Richard Betts, who provocatively presented peace itself as a problem in a largely forgotten article from 1997 asking, “Should Strategic Studies Survive?” Betts answered his title question in the affirmative. As one of the most prominent scholars that strategic studies has ever produced, it’s unsurprising Betts would come to the field’s defense. It’s more surprising, though, considering that Betts has a long record warning about the limits of the use of force and expressing skepticism about...
The implications of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump over the weekend remain unclear. Will it lead him to strike a more conciliatory tone during the upcoming Republican National Convention? Will it make more Americans sympathize with him? And then there are the questions of what led to the shooting. Why did this individual try to kill Trump? These questions were intensified by the news that the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is investigating the incident as domestic terrorism. It is too early to conclusively determine why this happened--and we may never know as the...