Twenty year recollections of the 2003 invasion of Iraq are popping up. Some are debating whether there were any positive outcomes from the war, others reflecting on what it meant for those who fought (on the US side) or suffered (on the Iraqi side). The Iraq war has...
The blogosphere peaked somewhere in the mid-2000s, so why would anyone start blogging in 2023?
The Russian government has developed a symbiotic relationship with the country’s pseudoscientific community.
One year ago, Russia launched an illegal war on Ukraine, committing horrific war crimes against the people of Ukraine. Analyses and memorials abound, and I'm probably not the only person writing...
My most recent Foreign Affairs article, co-authored with Justin Casey, landed yesterday. The article started out as an argument about how the normalization of the far right might affect national and international security. Those issues remain a major thread, but the...
Professor Ann Towns of the University of Gothenburg visits the Hayseed Scholar podcast. Professor Towns grew up in Sweden, and was interested in playing music and especially performing classical music as a child. But by the time she was in high school, she wanted to broaden her horizons, and get...
The Biden administration’s jarring revisionism on economic policy toward China (and by extension the world) is reviving discussions (most acute during the Trump and George W. Bush years) about whether it’s right to label the United States a revisionist power. There’s a lot at...
A distinctly unoriginal take on the pathologies of overvaluing academic “novelty.”
When I first started teaching intro to IR, I closed the semester with lectures on climate change and the second Congo war (or "Africa's world war"). This was part of my effort to include current and overlooked aspects of international relations. As time went on, and discussions spread about how IR...
We need a critical strategic studies, or maybe a strategic peace studies. Critical security studies, of course, is a venerable research tradition that I sometimes identify with. There are also scattered references to the phrase “critical strategic studies” out there...
When it comes norm dynamics and how we theorize them, uncertainty presents something of a paradox. We study norms because we think that they matter. But if norms are inherently uncertain, then how is it possible that they constitute, constrain, and otherwise shape the behavior of global actors? Unless norms produce stable and defined expectations, then how can they have the power to structure international politics?
Millions of people around the world are watching breathlessly as teams compete in the World Cup, held in Qatar. Many others--like me--tune it out, turned off by that guy in grad school who spent a semester in Barcelona and then pretended to be a life-long Spain fan. But this year, the World Cup...
I write to you as the new executive editor of International Security, the first woman to hold this position. I am taking the opportunity graciously provided by the Duck of Minerva team to introduce myself to you. I also want to thank my most recent predecessors, Sebastian Rosato (pro tem), Morgan...
The Bidens are serving the Macrons US-made wine and cheese. A cute gesture or a clumsy diplomatic move?
Since 2014 the international community has considered the issue of autonomy in weapons systems under the framework of the United Nations (UN) Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW). Despite hopes that 2022 would see some kind of breakthrough, the 2019 eleven guiding principles remains...
“Some came to kill and the others came to protect” says the main male character with a charisma of a doorknob to his love interest in the “based on real events” movie “Crimea” (2017), financed by the Russian Ministry of Defense. The hour and a half epic features many equally deep and...