What is the topography of international-relations theory in the People’s Republic of China? What …
Episode 24: International Relations in China
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Recent Posts
Killings in Kandahar: Implications
The news out of Kandahar is pretty awful: the top leadership of the province was killed in an apparent attempt to kill General Austin Miller, the commander of US and NATO forces in the country. ...
Writing Wednesdays: write to a deadline by any means necessary
Scholarly work is often written to deadline—the contribution to an edited volume, the essay for a journal’s special issue, and the book review are all going to be fit into someone else’s bigger...
Peacekeeping’s Perverse Effects: Bolsonaro and Brazil’s Remilitarized Politics
In under two weeks, Brazil will have the second round of its presidential election. Former military officer and fan of fascists Jair Bolsonaro looks set after a strong first-round showing to defeat...
More Recent Posts
Kim Jong Un’s Ascent (2): Rocket Launch as a Sign of a Power Struggle?
Here is part one, where I argued that Kim’s rise scrambles our conventional wisdom on NK, opening a lot of unexpected room, at least early in his tenure, to try to deal. The cold war stand-off in Korea is now so bad, that there is little to lose in trying to talk with him, and it would seem like a...
Belated Friday Nerd Blogging.
Though my ISA experience was indeed interrupted both by an ultimate game and a nasty case of the flu, rumors of my disappearance have been wildly exaggerated. A travel-intensive Friday day plus a kid-intensive Saturday are all that have impeded timely nerd blogging this week. It won't happen often.
Kim Jong Un’s Ascent (1): A Unique Negotiating Opportunity
Or maybe not…The following short piece for the Korean National Defense University was written after the Leap Day Deal, but before the rocket launch announcement. In the interim, the US has decided to cancel the leap day deal, which is entirely understandable, but a mistake nonetheless I think....
Has US political communication risen from the dead?
The 2012 International Studies Association (ISA) Annual Convention in San Diego this week was a good opportunity to test the state of US political communication. Studies of political communication in previous ISAs have been marked by an obsession with analyzing media content then extrapolating...
China’s Counter to the Asian ‘Pivot’ (2): ‘Swarms’ in the Pacific
Part one is here, where I noted China’s growing fear of encirclement (I get Chinese students a lot who talk about this). So, in the role of China, I argued for an Indian charm offensive to prevent encirclement, and how China might buy off Korea from the US camp by abandoning North Korea. Here are...
China’s Counter to the Asian ‘Pivot’ (1): Korea, India
So the US is supposedly going to pivot to Asia and start worrying more about China. This makes sense (which is probably why we won’t do it). The Middle East has become a pretty terrible sinkhole of American power. Increasingly the verdict on the war on terrorism is negative, and we should probably...
Russia’s Dubious Place in the BRICS: A Response to My Critics
My original post suggesting that Putin’s bogus reelection might be cause to eject Russia from the BRICS got a lot of traffic and comment (both here and on my own site). It’s gotten to the point where it’s just easier to summarize my responses to a general set of critiques. It seems there are three...
Kim can rap, but can he run the World Bank?
I've been conspicuously silent on the matter of who would or should succeed Robert Zoellick as President of the World Bank. This was because I was convinced that it was coming down to a Hobson's choice between two narcissistic, white male economists: Larry Summers, former World Bank chief...
The Neocons Made Me Do It: Iraq and the Alibi of Liberal Hawks
Looking back on the disaster (or extremely Pyhrric Victory) that was the Iraq War, Stephen Walt reflects:'The remarkable thing about the Iraq war is how few people it took to engineer. It wasn't promoted by the U.S. military, the CIA, the State Department, or oil companies. Instead, the main...
The tradeoffs of getting to graduate school in political science
This is the nerd equivalent of a dad joke. A pair of posts today from political scientists I admire prompts me to postpone my musings on the Hunger Games and to talk about how to get to graduate school in political science again instead. In an effort to convince you to read on, I'll name the...
Seoul 2012 Nuclear Security Summit
This week is the big nuclear security summit in Seoul, with something like 60 attending countries and over 40 heads of state or government. A friend from a Korean expat magazine here in town asked me for a brief write-up. Here are the issues as I see them from Korean IR and the local media. For...
Roseanne vs Kim: TV icons and the Republican ‘war on women’
Over the last few weeks it has been hard not to get overwhelmed by all the headlines related to the Republican primaries and women. There has been theRush Limbaugh fiasco, with Rush outdoing his usual dink-guisting self by calling law student Sarah Fluke a slut. This has been followed by...