The COVID-19 virus scrambled the plans of social scientists whose research depends on field work, including many who use and reflexive methods. It became almost impossible to do research that depends on face-to-face interviews, personal interactions, and participant observations. It's difficult to imagine how someone like Elisabeth Jean Wood, who spent months in El Salvador (in a conflict zone, no less), could do inspiring field research during...
Aniruddha Saha is currently a third-year doctoral candidate at King’s College London. His research examines India’s nuclear policy with the United States through a constructivist approach and is supported by King’s International Postgraduate Research Scholarship.
Chandler A. Myers is a Captain in the U.S. Air Force. He received his BS and MA from the U.S. Air Force Academy and Norwich University respectively. His articles have appeared in War Room, the U.S. Army War College’s online national security journal, Divergent Options, and The Defense Post. Chandler’s research interests include geostrategic strategy and military affairs, realism international relations theory, the role of education in foreign...
Articles by authors with foreign-sounding names are cited far less than those written by people with “typically-American” names.
In 2014, John Mearsheimer authored a Foreign Affairs article in which he blamed that year’s Ukrai…
The problem with saying that Russia had legitimate security fears and that NATO expansion is partly to blame for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is that it omits some parts of the picture while exaggerating others. It creates a lopsided view. It magnifies every remote and hypothetical security threat to Russia, while ignoring the very real security threats to Russia’s neighbors, and ignoring Western efforts to accommodate Russia’s security concerns. The framing reflects habitual blindspots that have distorted many left-wing perspectives on Vladimir Putin and Russian foreign policy.
Jamie Mayerfeld is Professor of Political Science and Adjunct Professor in Law, Societies, and Justice at the University of Washington, where he is also a faculty associate of the Center for Human Rights and an associate faculty member of the Program on Ethics. He has received fellowships from Columbia Law School, Princeton University, and the University of Washington Simpson Center for the Humanities. Mayerfeld specializes in political theory...
Idean Salehyan is a Professor of Political Science at the University of North Texas, Executive Director of the Peace Science Society (International), and the co-Director of the Social Conflict Analysis Database project.
For Mearsheimer “freedom” and “prosperity” are simply weapons of great power politics rather than aspirations sought by the Ukrainian people.
J. Patrick Rhamey Jr. is Associate Professor in the Department of International Studies and Political Science at the Virginia Military Institute. He also serves on the board of the TransResearch Consortium, an international group of scholars focusing on global transitions driven by power relations and demographic shifts. His academic work focuses on global hierarchy, comparative regionalism, and the international politics of sport. With Tadeusz...
It's been a rough week for John Mearsheimer. He has come under a barrage of criticism for his claim that Russia's aggression towards Ukraine is the West's fault. His theoretical tradition, realism, has also come under fire, for producing not only (arguably) bad policy takes but policy takes that don't seem to flow from the theory itself. Does this mean that all of realism is flawed? I would argue no, by pointing to another target of such...
Exercising feminist curiosity: how Ukraine women are involved in the conflict and how Putin’s nationalist fever dream is a patriarchal one.