According to conventional wisdom, Disney’s Andor is the best Star Wars narrative in years. Political scientists seem to agree. Dan Drezner speaks for many when he writes that the show's "writing is stellar," its "locations are great," and its "visuals" are "arresting." "But," he argues, "there’s a deeper, simpler reason" why Andor succeeds so well: it is "the first Star...
Adam, Daniela and Jarrod discuss the challenge of thinking about climate justice in the context of IR and existing models of justice and reparations. Does the Holocaust and other human rights cases provide a good or useful template? Can IR approaches even handle climate change? https://duckofminerva.podbean.com/e/climate-justice-and-ir/
Like many, I woke up in shock at the massive earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria. The earthquake, centered in Gaziantep, has killed 3,000 as of Monday afternoon devastated southeast Turkey and northern Syria. In addition to Gaziantep, other affected Turkish cities were Sanliurfa and Diyarbakir [Note-these aren't the proper spellings as I can't figure out how to insert Turkish characters]. The tragedy of Turkey's southeast Any destruction...
Anita R. Kellogg is an Assistant Professor at the Dwight D. Eisenhower School for National Security and Resource Strategy, National Defense University. She is also a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Dr. Kellogg is working on a book that examines the business community's role in foreign policy decision-making to prevent military conflict between economically...
Dr. Alexis Henshaw is the author of Why Women Rebel: Understanding Women’s Participation in Armed Rebel Groups (Routledge, 2017) and co-author of Insurgent Women: Female Combatants in Civil Wars (Georgetown University Press, 2019). She is currently an assistant professor at Troy University. Her research interests include gender issues in international politics, civil wars, conflict management, and Latin America. She has also published work on...
It's a nostalgia episode for our two hosts, Patrick and Dan. They tackle Mustafa Emirbayer's 1997 article in the American Journal of Sociology, "Manifesto for a Relational Sociology." According to Emirbayer, "Sociologists today are faced with a fundamental dilemma: whether to conceive of the social world as consisting primarily in substances or processes, in static 'things' or in dynamic, unfolding relations." Was...
What follows is my general philosophy on China issues, by way of answering the hardest of hard defense framing questions regarding China. After my most recent piece in Foreign Affairs, I got a note from a semi-prominent friend in Washington's foreign policy community basically praising it but also posing some tough questions about China policy. In my view they're the wrong questions. But we've known each other a long time, and my...
Election observation is at a turning point. Roughly 80-85% of elections around the world are subject to election observation. The majority of these are in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. While international election observation is important for democracy promotion and electoral integrity, it has undermined the agency of those being observed. A growing push for domestic observers highlights the importance of local involvement, expertise and...
nna Kapambwe Mwaba is an assistant professor of Government at Smith College where she is also affiliated with the African Studies program. Mwaba was a McPherson/Eveillard Postdoctoral Fellow in Government from 2019-2021. She earned her doctorate in political science from the University of Florida, Gainesville, with concentrations in comparative politics and international relations. Her research focuses on African agency and the role of African...
What's the title? Latham, Andrew., 2022. Medieval Sovereignty, ARC Humanities Press. It argues that? A series of thirteenth-century contests over the locus and character of supreme authority in Latin Christendom provided the conceptual raw materials that later thinkers ultimately assembled into the early modern constitutive norm of “sovereignty.” So why should we care? It seeks to counter the tendency of scholars in the field of IR to...
Justin Casey and I have a new piece at Foreign Affairs. We discuss the debate about whether or not modern reactionary populism is a variant of fascism (maybe) and whether the dynamics of fascism during the Interwar period holds any lessons for the present (probably). Check it out.