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.
My most recent Foreign Affairs article, co-authored with Justin Casey, landed yesterday. The article started out as an argument about how the normalization of the far right might affect national and international security. Those issues remain a major thread, but the true heart of the piece is a discussion of the dynamics of the transnational right during the 1920s and 1930s (that is,...
Andrew Latham is a professor of international relations and political theory at Macalester College, Saint Paul, MN; a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities, Washington, DC; and a regular opinion contributor at The Hill newspaper.
My partner used to refer to Worf as the Klingon equivalent of a Kantian. The Klingon-centric episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: DS9 make clear that Worf is committed to a deontological interpretation of Klingon ethics. If you're still reading this, you likely know that, first, Klingon ethics and morality are built around personal honor and, second, Worf was raised by humans. Because he spent his youth without much, if...
Professor Ann Towns of the University of Gothenburg visits the Hayseed Scholar podcast. Professor Towns grew up in Sweden, and was interested in playing music and especially performing classical music as a child. But by the time she was in high school, she wanted to broaden her horizons, and get out of not only her town but Sweden. That led her to Kansas, where she finished high school in an exchange program. She lived outside of a small town,...
The Biden administration’s jarring revisionism on economic policy toward China (and by extension the world) is reviving discussions (most acute during the Trump and George W. Bush years) about whether it’s right to label the United States a revisionist power. There’s a lot at stake in whether the United States is perceived as—or actually is—a “revisionist” (vice “status quo”) power. Theories predicting war are built out of...
Over at Lawyers, Guns & Money, Cheryl Rofer raises concerns about the possibility that STRATCOM is trying, per Defense News, to “furiously” rewrite U.S. deterrence strategy Writing “a new nuclear deterrence theory” is not a college essay. Nor can it “furiously” be done overnight, as if that essay were due tomorrow. The nuclear deterrent, which is what people like Richard often call the nuclear arsenal, has never deterred smaller wars....
I've been very slowly working on a post about whether reactionary populism is a form of fascism. Well, it's more about the debate itself — and particularly "things I find annoying." One of them is when participants make arguments based on their theoretical priors about the causes of interwar fascism. "It can't possibly be fascism because fascism was a response to World War I" or "It can't possibly be fascism because big business doesn't support...
A distinctly unoriginal take on the pathologies of overvaluing academic “novelty.”
I recently posted "I'm done." I then axed every other tweet on my timeline, and I disabled automatic x-posting between Twitter and Mastodon. Still, I'm not ready to delete my account; I've been trying to decide what to do about automated posting at @dhnexon, @DuckofMinerva, and @WhiskeyIRT. Odds are that you're reading this on Twitter, and therefore know that I haven't disabled this functionality. I'm facing the same dilemma that a lot of...
When I first started teaching intro to IR, I closed the semester with lectures on climate change and the second Congo war (or "Africa's world war"). This was part of my effort to include current and overlooked aspects of international relations. As time went on, and discussions spread about how IR should deal with racial and environmental issues, I expanded these lectures. The former now looks at whether IR is up to the task of addressing...