If you’ve spent any amount of time in Washington, there’s a good chance you’ve internalized a rosier narrative of the Cold War than the actual history warrants (I certainly had). To correct that, I have an essay out in Foreign Affairs with...
Much ink has been spilled since last Sunday about the massacre at King’s Landing. Why did Dany carpet-bomb a civilian population after a city had surrendered? Was this a sign of her growing madness?...
Here’s my argument: Late 80s/early 90s Soviet Union. The United Kingdom in 2016. The United States 2016 to now. Three contemporary examples of international suicide that conventional IR neither...
I assigned Plato’s Theaetetus this semester in my foreign policy class. It was the very first thing we read in a course that included more standard text’s like Walter Russel Mead’s Special...
My Facebook feed filled up this weekend with salutes to veterans. My friends were mostly Americans, and so most of these (indeed, I'd bet all of them) were tributes to U.S. soldiers. For Americans, of course, Sunday was Veterans Day, but for the British and others it was Remembrance Day....
Good morning, Happy Veteran's Day. In this 100% Petraeus-free edition of morning linkage, we note: Paul Atwood, author of War and Empire: The American Way of Life, meditates critically on the meaning of Veteran's Day 2012. The Article 32 evidentiary hearing on Staff Sgt. Robert Bales revisits the...
No, we're not having avian problems. Rather, we know that our archives are littered with artifacts of conversion: visible code, weird blockquoting, and so on. So, the plea: if you come across anything like this, please email me with the post link so that I can edit it. After a few years, we might...
Cyberwar is everywhere. I am sure there is some selection bias in my perspective, but I can't read the news without finding another 'cyberwar will be the new 9/11'article. The narrative? Our digital futures are in a precarious balance and threatened by the great cyber powers itching to destroy our...
The thirteenth Duck of Minerva podcast features Nicholas Onuf.
Rob Farley had me on "Foreign Entanglements" yesterday. I'm in "mellow mode," but at least we have hats! Links below: Heather Hurlburt looks at what the election says about US foreign-policy debates. Problem: something like 5% of the electorate gave a &!@ about national security when it came...
Since this is my first post, I want to thank Charli, Dan, and everyone else for giving me this opportunity to, well, spout off about whatever I want. They may regret it. To start, as someone of you might remember from a guest post that I did over the summer, one of the projects I am currently...
Last Tuesday, Rwanda’s high court sentenced Victoire Ingabire to eight years in prison for conspiring to harm the country through war and terror and minimizing the 1995 genocide. Some of the evidence used against her include questioning why no Hutu victims were mentioned in a genocide memorial. ...
In preparing for my spring semester course, a seminar for honors undergraduates on research methodologies, I've been paring down readings and reviewing potential books to add to my syllabus. My needs are pretty specific, since I need something that bright undergrads can read and is quantitatively...
When time is short, attribution of links is the first casualty. Walter Russel Mead sees evidence of the "Anglosphere effect" in Australian, Canadian, and Indian relations. This reminds me that I am very much looking forward to reading Srdjan Vucetic's The Anglosphere: A Genealogy of a Racialized...
When governments offer concessions to dissident groups in the midst of a terror campaign, they often see an increase in violence take place afterwards. For example, between 1968 and 1977, attacks conducted by the ETA claimed the lives of 73 people. Partial autonomy was granted to the Basque...
Audio from the Speculative Fiction and Pedagogy panel at the International Studies Association-Northeast 2012 convention.