In a world of multiple and overlapping crises, can norms and rules-based institution still create order amidst uncertainty? Do existing norms and frameworks for international cooperation enjoy sufficient legitimacy to help us navigate the interacting and concatenating effects of crises? A new symposium explores the question: “Whither norms (research) in times of uncertainty?”
Looking for some podcast episodes to give a listen to? I’ve got suggestions.
Early accounts of the Cuban Missile Crisis, including Graham Allison’s canonical Essence of Decision, tend to represent it as a two-player game in which John F Kennedy and Nikita Krushchev...
The October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis is one of the most closely-studied events of the Cold War. For several decades, the missile crisis literature supported a largely heroic U.S.-centric...
Initial speculation about Nord Stream reveals both the strengths and limitations of using international-relations models to make sense of unfolding events
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...
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...
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...
Some more excerpts from G. Loews Dickinson’s writings on international affairs.
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.
Rather than accept subordination to the Ming and Qing, Southeast Asian states contested Chinese international ordering in the early modern period.
Christopher Clary on his new book, which looks at why international rivalry is a hard habit to break.
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...
The Qatar crisis threatened to upend Middle East politics. Instead, it fizzled out. That says a lot about international relations, and how to study it. In June 2017, Saudi Arabia and the UAE--along with a few other states--announced a blockade of Qatar. Frustrated with Qatar's tolerance of...
The security dilemma plays a central role in Walt and Mearsheimer’s reading of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But what if they get the security dilemma wrong?
In 2018 and 2019, two Boeing 737 MAX planes crashed, killing 346 people hailing from 36 different countries across the globe. Now, some of the families who lost loved ones are challenging in U.S. federal court the Department of Justice’s (“DOJ”) settlement with Boeing. No matter what the court...