126 countries now publish a national security strategy or defense document, and 45 of these feature
a leaders’ preambles. How these talk about the world, or not, is surprisingly revealing of historical
global strategic hierarchies.
Recent Posts
Some Thoughts on Turkey and the Cuban Missile Crisis
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...
A Postcolonial Approach to the Cuban Missile Crisis
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...
No, social science didn’t kill international relations, part 58
Earlier this week, professional opinion-haver Tom Nichols posted a "short" Twitter thread complaining that the push to make IR a social science, combined with the dominance of realism, is leading to...
More Recent Posts
Forget the 800-pound gorilla: the United States is the 300,000-pound blue whale of IR scholarship
This is a guest post from Cullen Hendrix, Director of the Sié Chéou-Kang Center for International Security and Diplomacy and Professor at the Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver. International relations and international security scholarship have a U.S. bias problem—or so...
A War On … Something?
This is a guest post by Linda Monsees who works as a Post-Doctoral Researcher at Goethe University Frankfurt and is the author of Crypto-Politics. After wars on drugs, Christmas and everything in between, it seems that we people tend to call everything a war – everything despite a real war. But...
Protecting Civilians Through Responsible Scholarly Engagement (Vacation Planning Edition)
Recently I highlighted Korbel's new Responsible Engagement Institute, an important innovation in our profession. I shouted this out in the context of my own concerns with survey experiments that (perhaps irresponsibly) inflate the appearance of American support for targeting civilians abroad....
Seeing Israel and Palestine Up Close
I just came back from eight days in Israel and Palestine, as I participated in a program, Academic Exchange, that has already taken something like 600 scholars (mostly IR but also other political scientists, lawyers [including my brother-in-law], and some economists) to learn more about the place,...
Will Republican voters punish Trump for a trade war with China? It depends.
This is a guest post from Shana Gadarian and Dan McDowell, both Associate Professors at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. Earlier this month, after Chinese authorities reportedly backtracked on a set of economic reform promises as part of ongoing trade discussions, President Trump...
On Responsible Scholarly Engagement
Rob Farley has posted a Lawyers, Guns and Money podcast discussing my new research with Alex Montgomery on why reports of Americans' willingness to target civilians have been greatly exaggerated. One theme we discussed that bears emphasizing are questions of why we do the survey research we do,...
Why Do Opinion Leaders Misjudge Public Attitudes?
Last week, Dina Smeltz, Jordan Tama, and I had a piece in the Monkey Cage on the results of our 2018 survey of 588 foreign policy opinion leaders. We found that these opinion leaders misestimated public attitudes on (1) US engagement in the world, (2) support for trade, (3) support for military...
So Call Me Maybe
A recent IR Twitter flare-up occurred on a seemingly innocuous topic illustrated by the flow-chart above: what should I call my professor? A PSA from Prof. Megan L. Cook recommended students to address their professors as Professors or Dr., avoiding references to their marital status or first...
The ULTIMATE Academic Job Market Guide
The following is a guest post by K. Anne Watson, a PhD candidate in Political Science and International Affairs at the University of Georgia's School of Public and International Affairs. The academic job market is incredibly stressful. This is at least partly because so much of the process tends...
Are Generic Drugs Safe? Big Claims in a New Book
I was in the car when the Dallas radio station KERA came on with an interview with the journalist Katherine Eban, author of the new book Bottle of Lies, in which she claims that the generic pharmaceutical industry faces widespread problems of quality. A high percentage of generic drugs...
US should support environmental peacebuilding and humanitarian efforts for Palestinians
This is a guest post from Erika Weinthal, a Professor at Duke University and Jeannie Sowers, an Associate Professor at the University of New Hampshire What is often referred to as environmental peacebuilding – the process of governing and leveraging the use of the environment and natural resources...
Americans Oppose Killing Civilians. Reports Saying Otherwise Are Wrong.
Three reasons why you shouldn’t worry too much about the blood-thirstiness of your fellow Americans.