The October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis is one of the most closely-studied events of the Cold War. For several decades, the missile crisis literature supported a largely heroic U.S.-centric narrative that relied primarily upon the perspectives of President John F. Kennedy’s administration. This U.S.-centrism is generally acknowledged today, and the literature is increasingly enriched by the emergence of Soviet sources. However, the...
Lorraine Bayard de Volo is a political scientist and serves as Professor in the Department of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her areas of research include gender, sexuality, and race as they relate to militarization, war, and revolution in Latin America. She has conducted fieldwork in Cuba, Colombia, Mexico (Chiapas), and Nicaragua. She also does work on gender and political violence in the U.S., with particular...
Earlier this week, professional opinion-haver Tom Nichols posted a "short" Twitter thread complaining that the push to make IR a social science, combined with the dominance of realism, is leading to bad takes on Ukraine. Despite my mindfulness-inspired efforts to ignore annoyances on social media, I felt compelled to respond (with the above picture). I was tempted to leave it at that, but this sort of argument appears every five years or so,...
Any veteran (or better, victim) of a US grad program in IR will be familiar with the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. The Crisis is widely considered a turning point in the Cold War, the moment when both Soviet and American leaders realized that they had come perilously close to a devastating nuclear exchange that could have led to a global war. From then onwards, we are told, relations between the two superpowers took on a different cast,...
Itty Abraham is a professor in the Arizona State University School for the Future of Innovation in Society (SFIS). Before moving to Tempe, he taught at the National University of Singapore, The University of Texas at Austin, and was a program director at the Social Science Research Council. His research covers subjects ranging from postcolonial technoscience and nuclear power to refugees, borderlands and foreign policy. He has received grants...
The debacle over the Congressional Progressive Caucus’ letter on Ukraine reflects the underlying tensions between progressive values and realist grand strategies of restraint—as well as the danger of progressives failing to see the difference between the two.
This post is the first in a four part symposium on the Cuban Missile Crisis, one of the the most studied cases of IR. With the release of documents in recent decades, historical revisions have challenged the received wisdom informed by mainstream approaches to nuclear strategy and a US-centric perspective. However, these revisionist accounts are not well incorporated by IR narratives of the crisis. Sixty years...
I think a lot of people are kidding themselves about what grand strategy is—it’s worldmaking. It’s an attempt to put the power of the state in service of grand political purpose. States big and small can have grand strategies because states big and small have elites who use state power to serve their visions. When you think of grand strategy this way, most of what passes for grand strategic categories and policy prescriptions are exposed as...
Professor Helen Kinsella joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast. Professor Kinsella grew up in Ithaca, New York, and she reflects on what that was like, plus a reluctance or indifference to going to college. She eventually chose Bryn Mawr and she talks about what an amazing environment she experienced there. Professor Kinsella also spent some time at Reed college, then after college she went to Seattle and worked with victims of domestic abuse, and...
The University of Chicago’s Paul Poast claims that G. Lowes Dickinson is was the OG “modern” theo…
Many around the world are on edge over the possibility of Vladimir Putin using tactical nuclear weapons to stem Ukraine's battlefield successes. This has revived calls, present since before Putin invaded Russia's neighbor, to negotiate a way out of this war. Those issuing these calls see themselves as defenders of peace, but they are missing a major portion of what peace requires. Calls for "peace" Many in America have urged restraint in our...
Everybody’s talking about nuclear war with Russia right now and it bugs me, not least because I’ve seen this nuclear frenzy before. Now, I think people have good reason to be worried about Russian nuclear use, as I wrote some five months ago. But what gets me about “the discourse” is that a tremendous amount of it is ahistorical. On the one hand, the conversation is weighted down with the opinions of people with large...