Kate Schick is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Her teaching and research interests lie at the intersection of critical theory and international ethics. She is author of Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice (2012) and co-editor of The Vulnerable Subject: Beyond Rationalism in International Relations (with Amanda Russell Beattie, 2013), Recognition in Global Politics:...
Two recent interviews in the New Yorker have received substantial attention in recent weeks. Unfortunately, taken together, they make the IR discipline look terrible. How can IR theorists demonstrate their discipline’s relevance in the face of rapidly changing historical events?
In December of 2020, the U.S. government announced that hackers – most likely from Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU – had compromised over two hundred companies and federal agencies. What sets the SolarWinds attack apart from previous incidents is its sheer scale. The company has over 300,000 customers worldwide, according to filings made to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission… Targeted institutions include the U.S....
This piece is the third of a three-part series grappling with the role of political economy in making a just, sustainable international order. Neoliberalism — the ideology of the primacy of capital — has been bad for American statecraft. It’s a major reason why we have no economic strategy. And I’m totally a get-out-of-neoliberalism stan. But where we go from here matters. The new post-liberal right, for example,...
Recent chatter about David Remnick's interview of Stephen Kotkin reminds me of another interview that Kotkin recorded in February. Kotkin draws an analogy between Putin's decision to invade Ukraine and Stalin's decision to give Kim Il-sung the "green light" to invade South Korea in 1950. The comparison not only highlights the dysfunctions of personalist regimes, but the (potential) effects of the Russo-Ukraine War on U.S. foreign policy. Back...
Watching recent events (and inspired by this tweet about Latvia's PM's take on this), I am reminded of a famous misquotation from the American war in Vietnam: "we had to destroy the village in order to save it." Seems like Putin's Russia is killing the kin in order to save them. The attacks on the Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine are hurting those that Russia is supposedly trying to help. This speaks to a variety of ethnic/irredentist...
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.