The buzzword of the first Trump administration was “Great Power Competition.” That was also a lie.
So much for “Great Power Competition”
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Recent Posts
Susan Sell: The Power of Mentorship and Example
This is the fifth in our series of remembrances on the late Susan Sell. There was a terrific gathering at ISA 2024 where friends and colleagues gathered to remember Susan's wit, her contributions to...
Sebastian Kaempf
Professor Sebastian Kaempf of the University of Queensland joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast this week. Seb grew up in Germany, with the fall of the Berlin Wall happening when he was entering his...
On reckoning and repair in the international: revisiting imperialism and race in IR
THe short-term contributions of the Special Issue have been worthwhile, but there remains a continued concern and challenge that with greater attention paid to race and imperialism in IR, these issues will become co-opted into the game of academic production, sanitised as intellectual curiosities, instead of being treated as matters of life and death that need to be opposed practically and not just on paper.
More Recent Posts
Episode 26: Anarchy vs. The Anarchy
The University of Chicago’s Paul Poast claims that G. Lowes Dickinson is was the OG “modern” theo…
Peace, Just Peace, and Ukraine
Many around the world are on edge over the possibility of Vladimir Putin using tactical nuclear weapons to stem Ukraine's battlefield successes. This has revived calls, present since before Putin invaded Russia's neighbor, to negotiate a way out of this war. Those issuing these calls see...
Nuclear Precarity and the Russia Crisis
Everybody’s talking about nuclear war with Russia right now and it bugs me, not least because I’ve seen this nuclear frenzy before. Now, I think people have good reason to be worried about Russian nuclear use, as I wrote some five months ago. But what gets me about “the...
Why Would Putin Sabotage Nord Stream?
Initial speculation about Nord Stream reveals both the strengths and limitations of using international-relations models to make sense of unfolding events
Making Sense of “Rules-Based” Anti-Liberalism
Dozens of regimes around the world are anti-liberal—autocratic to varying degrees—but also big fans of a "rules-based" international order, which for the past 50 years or so has been a neoliberal economic order. Not a coincidence. The reason an anti-liberal might also be a...
What makes for a successful conference?
Like many, I've finally gotten back on schedule after the American Political Science Association conference last week. The travel was easier for me than most others; the site, Montreal, is only two miles from home so I didn't have to deal with any airline mishaps. But I still, as always, wonder if...
Antagonistic Trust, Asian Insecurity, and “Strategic” Competition
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 Wellington in New Zealand, where I teach). The topic was “Trust-Building in Asia in an Era of Great...
The More Things Change…
Some more excerpts from G. Loews Dickinson’s writings on international affairs.
Our syllabi should be full of surprises
It’s no surprise that current events regularly lead us to update our syllabi. That doesn’t mean we can’t make “surprise” an important feature of our courses.
6+1 Questions about Social Positioning and International Order Contestation in Early Modern Southeast Asia
Rather than accept subordination to the Ming and Qing, Southeast Asian states contested Chinese international ordering in the early modern period.
6+1 Questions about The Difficult Policies of Peace: Rivalry in Modern South Asia
Christopher Clary on his new book, which looks at why international rivalry is a hard habit to break.
Five Lessons for responsible engagement when the world is on fire
Waves of global crises have generated challenges in nearly every corner of human life. Catastrophic climate change, an ever-morphing global pandemic, widening democratic decline, rising economic inequality, increasing violence, geopolitical rivalry, and war join deeply entrenched systemic racism...