Michael Lee is an Associate Professor in the Political Science Department at Hunter College. His work focuses on the politics of financial regulation, international monetary relations, politics of populism, crises, the sectoral politics of foreign policy, and the role of games in learning. His work has been published in Survival, PS: Political Science, Political Studies, and the British Journal of Politics and International Relations. He is...
WHAT’S THE NAME OF THE BOOK? Gregorio Bettiza. 2019. Finding Faith in Foreign Policy: Religion and American Diplomacy in a Postsecular World (New York, Oxford University Press) WHAT’S THE ARGUMENT? Since the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy has increasingly “desecularized,” such that it is now deeply intertwined with religious agendas, interests, and organizations. We see this trend in efforts to advance international...
It seems like everyone has an opinion to offer about the "lessons" that the United States needs to learn from the war Afghanistan. “Here’s what we must learn,” asserts the former NATO Commander, James Stavridis. Anthony Cordesman, one of the war’s great chroniclers, asks readers to “examine the full range of civil lessons as well as the military lessons.” Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haas worries that “we could learn the wrong...
There is perhaps no greater film institution than the James Bond franchise. Over 27 movies and 59 years from Doctor No (1962) to Goldfinger (1964) to the modern era of Goldeneye (1995) and Skyfall (2012), Bond is a touchstone in many people lives, although not without controversy. Bond is a threat to women, minorities, and buildings yet also an in-demand entertainment property. That is all over now. James Bond has been made redundant The...
Dan Spokojny is the founder of fp21, a think tank dedicated to transforming the processes and institutions of foreign policy. He previously served as a U.S. Foreign Service officer, including in the office of the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, and as a foreign policy legislative assistant in Congress. Dan is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of California, Berkeley. He focuses on the role of...
Anwar Gargash, a diplomatic advisor to the UAE, recently spoke to an international conference on the UAE's desire to smooth over tensions with Turkey and Iran. Turkey and the UAE found themselves on opposite sides of the Arab Spring, with the former supporting revolutionary movements around the Middle East and the latter trying to frustrate them. And the UAE shares Saudi concerns about Iran's influence. This may be, as Trita Parsi recently...
Matt Hancock, a Conservative MP and the UK’s Health Secretary during most of the Covid lockdowns, has failed upwards.
“Kuzushi” is the concept of off-balancing. It refers to a tactic of getting your opponent out of a fixed position where he’ll be vulnerable, maybe getting his weight tilted too much to one side or making him overcommit to a move. With kuzushi, you aren’t achieving anything; you’re opening up a window of opportunity. Window ajar, you have a split second to advance your position. A sweep or submission attempt that would’ve been impossible under normal conditions suddenly works against an unbalanced opponent.
If you’ve written a guest post for the Duck of Minerva recently, or published a piece at International Studies Quarterly while I was editor, you know that I really hate “heavy noun phrases.” Scholars seem to really like using them. I don’t know why. Perhaps they think it makes their writing sound more sophisticated. There’s an article at PS which is good at diagnosing the problem (but offers bad fixes).
The way that APSA leaders handled the Claremont Institute situation was troubling… will APSA, as an organization, be committed to some broadly liberal democratic values?
In this installment of “Whiskey Optional,” Stacie Goddard (Wellesley), Evelyn Goh (Australian Nat…
Corruption is an issue largely off the radar screens of many IR scholars. How can they better theorize corruption’s pervasiveness in international politics, while avoiding the biases of past approaches?