I had high hopes for director Kathryn Bigelow’s House of Dynamite, a new Netflix movie about U.S. nuclear command and control. There’s so much potential for cinema to unpack the dilemmas and tragedies of living under a nuclear sword of Damocles, and my initial reaction was disappointment at the ways this fails to be that movie. But for all its shortcomings, the film also serves as a sobering reminder of the profound peril nuclear weapons...
Philipp C. Bleek is professor in the Nonproliferation and Terrorism Studies program , and a fellow at both the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies and Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism, at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. He works on the causes, consequences, and amelioration of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons threats, from both state and non-state actors, at the...
What is the name of the journal article (or book) and what are its coordinates? Miray Philips. 2025. “The Social Construction of Christian Persecution through Quantification in International Religious Freedom Advocacy.” Sociology of Religion. https://doi.org/10.1093/socrel/sraf022 2. What’s the argument? In Washington, DC, International Religious Freedom advocates mostly rely on data by the Pew Research Center on religious restrictions and Open...
Miray Philips is an Assistant Professor in Sociology at the University of Toronto. Her research explores the transnational politics, meaning, and memory of violence and suffering in the Middle East and its diasporas. This research has been published or is forthcoming in the Sociology of Religion, Law & Society Review, the American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Memory Studies, and the Minnesota Journal of International Law. Her current book...
After years of calls for a ceasefire in Gaza, a ceasefire was recently announced and…those calling for the ceasefire are upset about it. There are some valid reasons to hold off on celebrating, but I worry this represents a deeper issue with how we conceive of peace and how we study the Middle East. And this will only hurt the Palestinians these voices claim to champion. The ceasefire The ceasefire the Trump Administration negotiated—or pushed...
Debates about Israel and Palestine have, as one scholar remarked to me, become the “third rail” in British academia. That needs to change. The terror attack in Manchester makes clear that UK academics must engage in a public, thoughtful, and careful discussion about Jews, Israel and Palestine. On October 2nd, 2025 — on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur — a Synagogue in Manchester was attacked in what has been officially...
Ilan Zvi Baron completed his doctorate at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, in 2007 where he was an E.H. Carr Scholar and recipient of an Overseas Research Scheme grant. He completed an MSc in International Relations at the London School of Economics and a BA (Hons) in Political Science at the University of Victoria, Canada. Professor Baron has held visiting positions at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of British...
Back in March, I wrote a post at Lawyers, Guns and Money called “Remember ‘Great Power Competition?’ Lol.” As the “Grand Strategy” of Trump 2.0 comes into focus, I thought it would be a good idea to revisit and update it. In brief, the normie national-security advisors who dominated the first Trump administration needed a way to make Trump’s semi-coherent ramblings legible to the global foreign-policy community. That is, to...
The Republic as we knew it is over. The fight now is whether the new one will be a fascistic, competitive authoritarian regime or a pluralist democracy that, one hopes, is better than what came before.
Ehud (Udi) Eiran is a Senior Lecturer (U.S. Associate Professor) and Chair of the Department of International Relations at the University of Haifa, Israel. He held research appointments at Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard Law School, and UC-Berkeley’s Center of Middle Eastern Studies. Eiran was also a visiting scholar at Stanford’s Department of Political Science. His research explores spatial dimensions of international conflict, with a...
What’s the name of the book, and where can we find it? American Conquest: The Northwest Indian War and the Making of US Foreign Policy (Stanford University Press, 2025). What’s the argument? Relations with Native American groups were constitutive of early U.S. foreign policy, and this should make us reconsider the notion that the United States was isolationist in this period. Moreover, the first U.S. war with Native American groups, the...
The UN General Assembly meeting has seen a growing number of states recognizing a state of Palestine, including Western powers like France, the United Kingdom and Canada. Debate has swirled over why they are doing this: is it a principled stand, an attempt to gain international or domestic clout, etc.? But there's a bigger question over whether this matters and when it may matter: that is, at what point does the informal recognition of an...