Lina Benabdallah is Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Wake Forest University and a visiting fellow at the Center for African Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of Shaping the Future of Power: Knowledge Production and Network-Building in China-Africa Relations (University of Michigan Press, 2020). Her research has appeared in International Studies Quarterly, International Studies Reviews, The Journal of...
Patrick Quinton-Brown is Assistant Professor of International Relations at Singapore Management University. Previously he was Departmental Lecturer in International Relations at Oxford University where he also held a Senior College Lectureship at University College, Oxford. His research focuses on sovereignty, intervention, critical and historical methods, and the Global South in the globalization of international society. It has recently been...
Oumar Ba is an assistant professor of international relations in the Department of Government at Cornell University. His research focuses on the politics of international law, race , empire, violence, and humanity.
Professor Lene Hansen of the University of Copenhagen likely needs no introduction to most listeners of this podcast. She has worked within what would be called the Copenhagen school or securitization theory, emphasizing within that school the overlooked lens of gender. Her work on discourse analysis is famous for being a key contribution to the development of especially interpretive methods in the 2000s and 2010s, and her more recent work in...
I recently submitted the below letter to Foreign Affairs in response to their latest issue's set of essays on Israel-Palestine peace. They decided not to run it, and I assume that's because of all the letters they get. However, I worry that we ignore the small-scale peace efforts that may be the best way to advance peace (or see them as problematic) so I wanted to post it here and try to make the case for them. My letter to Foreign Affairs To...
Over the past few decades, Political Science has seen an increasing institutionalization of Scholarship on Teaching and Learning (SoTL) through journals, book series, and professional associations. Over at PS: Political Science and Politics, we add to this body of literature by making the case for a pedagogical practice borrowed from Professional Military Education (PME)—the staff ride. A staff ride combines the study of historical campaigns...
So Jin Lee is a Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. She was previously a Nonresident Fellow for the Eurasia Group Foundation/Institute for Global Affairs. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Duke University and her research focuses on economic statecraft—namely, positive inducements and sanctions—as foreign policy, nuclear weapons, and...
The takeaway from last night's State of the Union address is that Biden's language continued decades-long trends of decreasing positive emotion, use of the term "we," and overall fewer words per sentence. Polarization data comes from V-Dem and the speeches were analyzed with LIWC. The State of the Union is a useful tool for seeing the U.S. in context over time, as well as demonstrating features that pundits this morning have suggested are...
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.
Andrew W. Neal is Professor of International Security at the University of Edinburgh. His most recent monograph is Security as Politics: Beyond the State of Exception (Edinburgh University Press, 2019). He is currently working on a project to collect and analyse all national security strategies in the world, and another on North Sea critical infrastructure protection.
What is the name of the book? Ches Thurber. 2021. Between Mao and Gandhi: The Social Roots of Civil Resistance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. What’s the argument? Variation in their social ties helps explain why some dissident organizations embrace the “nonviolent” strategy of civil resistance while others reject it, often turning instead to guns. The logic of civil resistance is predicated on the idea that by using primarily...
Ches Thurber is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Northern Illinois University. His scholarship examines the spectrum of global conflict with specific interests in civil resistance, civil wars, and civil-military relations. He is the author of Between Mao and Gandhi: the Social Roots of Civil Resistance. Other work has been published in International Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Peace Research, Conflict Management and Peace...