Paul Musgrave has written an important piece discussing how ideas developed within academia can have profoundly negative effects when they escape into the wild of the policymaking world. For someone like me who has been involved for many years in the Bridging the Gap project, whose goal is to better connect academics and policymakers, this argument is important and cautionary. (In addition to Musgrave’s recent Foreign Policy...
Today we're kicking off a new symposium on Paul Musgrave's Foreign Policy article, "Political Science Has Its Own Lab Leaks." In it, Musgrave likens academic disciplines to labs; academic theories that exercise political influence, in his metaphor, are like viruses. Perhaps, his piece suggests, international-relations scholars should exercise a bit more caution in their drive to “bridge the gap” between theory and policy. The contributors to...
Erica De Bruin’s research interests include civil-military relations and civil war. Her work focuses in particular on the dynamics of military coups, the spread of militarized policing, and the ways in which armed groups build legitimacy. She is the author of How to Prevent Coups d’état: Counterbalancing and Regime Survival (Cornell University Press, 2020). Her work has been published in the Journal of Peace Research, Journal of...
James Goldgeier is a Robert Bosch Senior Visiting Fellow at the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution and a Professor at the School of International Service at American University, where he served as Dean from 2011-17. In 2018-19, he held the Library of Congress Chair in U.S.-Russia Relations at the John W. Kluge Center and was a visiting senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Prior to joining American...
What we know about reputation and credibility doesn’t track with the claims of doomsayers. But it also doesn’t accord with those who argue that there’s “nothing to see here.”
M. Evren Eken has a PhD in Political Geography from Royal Holloway, University of London and works as a Lecturer in the Department of International Relations at Suleyman Demirel University, Turkey. His research interests lie at the intersections of critical geopolitics, critical military studies, visual culture and affect.
Ludvig Norman answers 6+1 questions about causal inference in interpretative scholarship
Ludvig Norman is Associate Professor of Political Science at Stockholm University, Sweden and Senior Fellow at the Institute of European Studies at UC Berkeley. His research focuses on Institutions of the European political order, democratic responses to political extremism and social science methodology. He is the author of the book The Mechanisms of Institutional Conflict in the European Union. His works have appeared in the Journal of Common...
Always attack. Even in defense, attack. The attacking arm possesses the initiative and thus commands the action. To attack makes men brave; to defend makes them timorous. Steven Pressfield, The Virtues of War Does America even know where is it heading? Fictitiously yes. Geopolitically no. So it does not admit the fact that it lost the war, the region, and the moral compass on civility. And nothing captures this more than the odd official...
Everyone is (rightly) thinking about Afghanistan, but I'm still thinking of Tunisia. Each fall I teach a Middle East politics class. And each fall I end our discussion on the Arab Spring with a debate over whether the Arab Spring actually mattered. Most students end up arguing that it didn't, or that its overall effects were negative. But they exclude Tunisia from this gloomy picture; they see it as the success story. This came to mind as...
Climate change poses substantial national, international and human security risks, but analysts have only recently shifted their focus toward how to simultaneously build peace in post-conflict environments and grapple with the dual challenges of mitigating and adapting to climate change.
Stacy D. VanDeveer is Professor of Global Governance and Human Security and Chair of the Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security and Global Governance in the John C. McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. His research interests include connections between environmental and security issues, EU environmental and energy politics, global environmental policymaking and...