In the recent Settling for Less: Why States Colonize and Why They Stop, Lachlan McNamee makes a rationalist argument—“colonization projects” are “characterized by a triangle of actors—settlers, indigenes, and the central state,” and for his purposes, we can “assume that all settler migration is voluntary and economically driven”. McNamee is not the only one with such a reading of colonial politics. Director, co-writer, and star Kevin Costner...
1. What is the name of the article and what are its coordinates? Aníbal Pérez-Liñán and Angie García Atehortúa. 2024. “Oversight Hearings, Stakeholder Engagement, and Compliance in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.” International Organization. 2. What’s the argument? Compliance with international law is hardly guaranteed. International bodies can secure greater compliance with their decisions by requesting regular reports from relevant...
Angie K. García Atehortúa is a human rights and criminal lawyer based in The Hague.
Aníbal Pérez-Liñán is Professor of Political Science and Global Affairs, and Director of the Kellogg Institute for International Studies. His work focuses on democratization, political institutions, executive-legislative relations, and the rule of law. He is the author of Presidential Impeachment and the New Political Instability in Latin America and of Democracies and Dictatorships in Latin America: Emergence, Survival, and Fall (with Scott...
Last year I was on a sabbatical in Edinburgh, and my family and I watched Eurovision for the first time. We loved the out-there electro-pop versions of local folk music, got bored by the slow ballads, and generally bought into the hype. This year, we were excited to discover it was streaming for US audiences on Peacock, and watched again. I assumed there would be some tensions over Israel's participation, and was right. There were protests both...
Labour MP David Lammy has a new piece in Foreign Affairs called, “The Case for Progressive Realism.” Where his manifesto is punchiest is in its unsparing critiques of British foreign policy: the Conservative Party has, over 14 years…sank deeply into nostalgia and denial about the United Kingdom’s place in the world. The government, for example, crashed out of the European Union without a clear plan for what to do next. It treated with contempt...
Even though the school year is ending, protests against Israel--most prominent on college campuses--will likely continue. Beginning at Columbia University, they gained attention and spread after a heavy-handed police response. Prompted by the Israeli attack on Gaza (retaliation for Hamas' attack on Israel), student protesters are calling on their universities to take action in opposition to Israel such as divestment from companies that do...
Does Whataboutism work? A new article has answers.
Wilfred Chow is an Assistant Professor in the School of International Studies, University of Nottingham Ningbo, China. His research interests include international relations, political economy, public opinion, and methodology.
This is the fifth in our series of remembrances on the late Susan Sell. There was a terrific gathering at ISA 2024 where friends and colleagues gathered to remember Susan's wit, her contributions to the discipline, and her career-long efforts to challenge orthodox thinking and staid hierarchies. I took my first Ph.D. class with Susan Sell at GW. She didn’t know it, but I was a “first generation” student, being the first one in my extended...
Professor Sebastian Kaempf of the University of Queensland joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast this week. Seb grew up in Germany, with the fall of the Berlin Wall happening when he was entering his teenage years. While it had a big impact on him, he distinctly remembers his parents’ emotional reactions to that moment. He also was a conscientious objector and thus did not serve in the German military but his service was in some ways even...
THe short-term contributions of the Special Issue have been worthwhile, but there remains a continued concern and challenge that with greater attention paid to race and imperialism in IR, these issues will become co-opted into the game of academic production, sanitised as intellectual curiosities, instead of being treated as matters of life and death that need to be opposed practically and not just on paper.