Name of the Book Justin Schon. 2020. Surviving the War in Syria: Survival Strategies in a Time of Conflict. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). What’s the Argument? Civilians in conflict zones face a range of threats and opportunities. They adopt survival strategies that reflect how they perceive those threats – where they come from, how severe they are, what options exist to respond to them – and what opportunities they believe are...
Many of academia’s core institutions are ‘held together by masking tape and pixie dust.’ But do they also rely on fantastical notions of academic karma?
What was I thinking before I realized the world outside my campus was real? The foreign policy world is gearing up for the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 next week. There will be think pieces, roundtables and symposia galore. I will have a piece here on the Duck with some of my own reflections on what the anniversary means. But right now I'm thinking back to twenty years ago this week, and what I was doing at the time. That may matter as much as...
Does China's more ambitious foreign policy and bid for "national rejuvenation" come at America's expense? It's a question where some neoliberals and some on the anti-imperialist left converge — in opposition to Washington conventional wisdom. Most of the D.C. Establishment now takes for granted that, obviously, China seeks to displace the United States, in Asia and the world. The Sinologist community is divided on the question. The neoliberal...
Though unlikely to happen any time soon, recent calls for the US to pay reparations to the Afghan people provide an opportunity to reflect on the complexities of reparations and global justice.
Fast fashion is generating more than just cheap clothing: it’s also a crisis of disposability affecting livelihoods in the Global South.
Paul Musgrave concludes the “Lab Leaks” symposium by engaging with his interlocutors and reflecting on the challenges faced by political science in an era of public-facing scholarship.
Paul Musgrave is assistant professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He studies U.S. foreign policy, international relations theory, and how oil revenues change political institutions. His research has appeared in International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, Comparative Political Studies, American Politics Review, and International Theory. and he has written for The Washington Post and other...
I was just about to block "Afghanistan" as a key word in my Twitter timeline when I saw several people asking why British conservatives were even more freaked out about the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan than American conservatives. The question was in response to the UK defense secretary saying that the United States isn't a superpower if it's not willing to keep up its endless wars. A UK intelligence officer swimming in the same ideological...
G. John Ikenberry is one of the most influential scholars of “liberal international order.” It’s likely that he, along with Dan Deudney, is responsible for popularizing the phrase. John’s most recent book, A World Safe for Democracy: Liberal Internationalism and the Crises of Global Order has reportedly shaped the thinking of the Biden foreign-policy team. I interviewed him for a recent podcast.
Musgrave’s identification of dangerous ideas is correct, but his metaphor risks entrenching the fundamental problem: the (inevitable) weaponization of “scientific objectivity.”
Tarak Barkawi an historian of war and empire. His scholarship uses interdisciplinary approaches to imperial and military archives to re-imagine relations between war, armed forces and society in modern times. He has written on the pivotal place of armed force in globalization, imperialism, and modernization, and on the neglected significance of war in social and political theory and in histories of empire. His last book, Soldiers of Empire,...