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.
The global distribution of material power changes from time to time. It’s something that happens, not something we should spend any amount of time pursuing or avoiding. I say this as someone who...
It turns out that it’s hard to write a roundup of happenings at the Duck of Minerva when there aren’t many to speak of. Much of that’s on me. What’s my excuse? Well, the kid finally contracted...
Like a lot of academics, I love Google n-grams, but not as much as the digitized archive Google uses to produce it. It’s a great warren of rabbit holes – even better than wikipedia – and I often...
A few unconnected recent happenings have reminded me that I've meant to do a short post on Charles Tilly, bellocentric (or "bellicist") theories of state formation, and where all of this stands in 2013. If you mention "Charles Tilly" and "state formation" to knowledgeable social scientists, their first association is almost always his famous line "war made the state and the state made war" (PDF). Scholars most frequently cite his work on state formation in the service of this line of argument.* Indeed, Tilly's argument also invariably gets translated into "more war, more state." This strikes...
We should stop using the term “isolationism” to describe policies tht entail a more restrained U.S. role in the world.