Or, who is the strawman here? This is my second post reflecting on the recent American Political Science Association annual meeting. The last one expressed concern about a new trend in the study of international politics. This one will focus on a long-standing issue that just doesn’t seem to go away: the refusal of certain research areas to actually engage with the literature they see as insufficient. The attack This incident occurred at an...
Are we reaching the limits of experimental approaches to international politics? I just returned from the American Political Science Association (APSA) annual meeting in Boston. I met up with some friends, connected with new people, provided some thoughts on academia to a grad student who reached out to me. My co-authors and I presented a paper from our new project on the role of religion in the UN. And I actually went to panels that weren’t...
Did the pandemic durably change our pedagogy in International Relations (IR), or were pandemic-induced changes only temporary measures with which we have since dispensed? This is an open question and not one I can conclusively answer here, but this is on my mind as I am writing a new preface and concluding chapter for the second edition of a volume I edited, Pandemic Pedagogy: Teaching International Relations amid COVID-19. Perhaps the most...
Potentially inflammatory rhetoric should be addressed with dialogue, not bans Recent antisemitic attacks have rightly led to concern among the US Jewish population. Over the weekend a man assaulted worshippers at a New York synagogue in an antisemitic attack. A man stabbed a Jewish man outside another New York synagogue that was displaying the Israeli flag. In separate incident, a man threw a brick through a Florida Chabad House. We’ve also...
We keep hearing that we live in an unprecedented “age of sanctions.” Trade and globalization data tell a different story — the world got bigger, not meaner.
Editorial Note: this post contains spoilers. Christopher Nolan is one of the most important working American movie directors. He is one of the few directors in the Hollywood system who consistently delivers non-franchise blockbusters. Many of his films, including Dunkirk and Oppenheimer, are as successful with critics as they are at the box office. The same is true of his most recent film, The Odyssey, which has surpassed $1 billion in...
Thies Niemeier is a Research Fellow at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt. Prior to joining PRIF, he was a Research Fellow at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies and received his doctorate from the University of Konstanz. Thies research spans geoeconomics and security studies, focusing on economic sanctions, military alliances, and international economic networks. As part of the Targeting project at the GIGA Institute, he is...
Alper H. Yağcı is an associate professor at the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Boğaziçi University (Türkiye) and a visiting researcher on sabbatical at the Institute of Political Science, Leiden University (Netherlands). He received his doctorate from the University of Massachusetts Amherst (USA). Alper H. Yağcı is the Turkey coordinator for the World Elite Database (WED) project, and his research activity focuss...
In January of 2025, the Republican party gained “the trifecta,” controlling the Presidency and the Senate, and the House of Representatives. Since then, congressional Republicans have done little to assert the prerogatives of the legislative branch. “The wrath of Donald Trump,” as one reporter wrote in June of this year, “has kept congressional Republicans in line for much of his second term…” With a handful of exceptions, congressional...
Erasmus Kersting is a professor of economics and the acting chair of the Department of Economics at the Villanova School of Business. His research is in the fields of development and international economics, international relations, as well as macroeconomics. Kersting's latest projects explore how American politics determine the degree of U.S. influence in international financial institutions and the impact of World Bank lending on financial...
We’re baaack!In the inaugural episode of the second season of Whiskey and International Relations…
The author is a doctoral student at the School of Public and International Affairs, University of Cincinnati. Their research interests lie in nuclear proliferation and cyber competition.