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.
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...