Proxy Patrimonialism and the Path to Pre-modernity
Patrimonialism has been making a comeback recently as a framework for interpreting Trumpian...
Huntington wasn’t wrong. He just wasn’t right
Big ideas often get watered down when tested empirically. Scott Appleby’s masterful Ambivalence of...
Episode 2: Being and Insecurity
Pauline Sophie Heinrichs, Nina Krickel-Choi, Jennifer Mitzen, and Brent Steele join Dan and Patri…
The Tao of the One: Trust, Rapprochement, and the Turning Wheel
Political scientists have a name for why only Nixon could open relations with Mao’s China, or why...
New
The Tao of the One: Trust, Rapprochement, and the Turning Wheel
Political...
Don’t Hold Your Breath on AI-Driven Wargaming
Even if you did have a LLM that could mirror human actions and decision-making processes in a wargame, it wouldn’t actually be sufficient to model how weird people are both as individual thinkers or thinking in groups
When Constitutional Functions Blur
Constitutional...
Featured
The Pedagogical Legacies of the Pandemic
Did the pandemic durably change our pedagogy in International Relations (IR), or were...
Episode 1: Gates of the West
We’re baaack!In the inaugural episode of the second season of Whiskey and International Relations…
How Russian economic policy is gender
Every year I make my third year Bachelor students read Carol Cohn’s article “Sex and Death in the...
Recent
Don’t Hold Your Breath on AI-Driven Wargaming
Even if you did have a LLM that could mirror human actions and decision-making processes in a wargame, it wouldn’t actually be sufficient to model how weird people are both as individual thinkers or thinking in groups
When Constitutional Functions Blur
Constitutional orders rarely announce that they are becoming less constitutional. More often, the...
What If Iran Acquired the Nuclear Bomb? A Case for Uncomfortable Diplomacy Over Catastrophe
Amid US and Israeli strikes aimed at preventing Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons,...
ACADEME
Middle East Studies: Still beating that strawman?
Or, who is the strawman here? This is my second post reflecting on the recent American Political...
The hypothetical science
Are we reaching the limits of experimental approaches to international politics? I just returned...
Divided Government and Multilateral Assistance
In January of 2025, the Republican party gained “the trifecta,” controlling the Presidency and the...
6+1 Questions about Resilient Statehood
Why did some states successfully avoid conquest by European empires? Logan Cochrane’s new, co-edited volume tackles this puzzle.