Lucrecia García Iommi is Associate Professor of Political Science at Fairfield University, where she teaches International Relations (IR) theory, U.S. foreign policy, and international law. Her research focuses on IR theory, norm dynamics, and global governance. She has published in International Studies Quarterly, International Relations, Global Constitutionalism and Cambridge Review of International Affairs. Most recently, she co-edited (with...
Once again, America is enduring the horrors of a mass shooting. This time a gunman attacked a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs, opening fire before patrons grabbed his weapon and beat him with it. As of the time of writing (Monday morning) five are dead, and there are fears the number will increase. And once again, we are trying to make sense of this. Why did the shooter do this? What could have prevented this? Was this "random, senseless"...
Sassan Gholiagha is a postdoctoral researcher at the European New School of Digital Studies (European University Viadrina). He works on norms, security, and international organizations and has published on topics such as critical norms research, drones, the Responsibility to Protect, and international drug control. His most recent book is The Humanisation of Global Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
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Early accounts of the Cuban Missile Crisis, including Graham Allison’s canonical Essence of Decision, tend to represent it as a two-player game in which John F Kennedy and Nikita Krushchev went, in Dean Rusk’s memorable phrase, “eyeball to eyeball” until the Soviets backed down and the crisis was resolved. Although these accounts made clear that Krushchev was bothered by the Bay of Pigs and other attempted incursions against the Cuban...
Hugh Gusterson (PhD, Stanford University, 1991) has a joint appointment in the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs and the Anthropology Department at UBC. Before coming to UBC in 2020, he taught at MIT, George Mason University, George Washington University, and the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is past president of the American Ethnological Society (2016-17) and has served on the executive boards of the American Anthropological...
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.