Jonathan J. Monten, a graduate student at Georgetown, has just published a piece called "The Roots of the Bush Doctrine: Power, Nationalism, and Democracy Promotion in U.S. Strategy" in International Security. Jon is one of what I hope will be a growing wave of scholars seeking to combine (in a coherent manner) structural realism with arguments about the role of ideology and identity in world politics. This is a research program Stacie Goddard...

I wasn't in my office on Wednesday, and thus didn't post a maxim. Given Dan Drezner's recent post on prospect theory and terrorism, I thought it would be interesting to post Guicciardini's views, in effect, on the rational-choice controversy in International Relations:What I said earlier about princes also applies to people with whom you must deal: always keep an eye not so much on what reason dictates they ought to do, as on what you believe...

I've pulled my post entitled "Tim Burke Wows Me." I want to write a more substantive reflection - and call for discussion - on what, if anything, the online debate about Theory's Empire tells us about "post-prefixed" approaches to IR, and that post will get in the way. Apologies to people with an RSS feed.

Robert Farley doesn't think much of Wretchard's (of the Belmont Club) take on the Battle of Guadalcanal. Here's what Rob has to say:So much is wrong with this; Wolcott does an effective job of demolishing the hyper-masculinity of Wretchard's argument. Let's be frank, if Al Qaeda were given the option of fighting Americans by Marquess of Queensbury rules on an open field in the middle of Afghanistan, they'd leap at it. Winning a war, in spite of...

A number of weblogs have linked to Elliot Cohen's Sunday Op-Ed in the Washington Post, "A Hawk Questions Himself." Cohen defends the basic rationale for the war, but slams the administration for its poor implementation of the Iraq occupation. Key quotation:But a pundit should not recommend a policy without adequate regard for the ability of those in charge to execute it, and here I stumbled. I could not imagine, for example, that the civilian...

Over the past decade, I've written a couple of book chapters about the use of the internet by transnational political activists. Environment, human rights, and peace organizations, for example, utilize the internet to communicate instantly with thousands of like-minded people around the world. Technology helps overcome resource mobilization costs for social movements.This use of the web generally helps progressive organizations promote their...

As I've discussed before, the current incarnation of "al-Qaeda" appears - at least based upon public documents - to be more of a diverse movement than a single organization. Indeed, "al-Qaeda" is, in some respects, linked together by the claims of particular groups to represent "al-Qaeda" and by the tendency of many western governments, pundits, and ordinary individuals to label any militant Islamicist terrorist attack as an act of "al-Qaeda."...

Writing in Slate, William Saletan argues that Al-Queda's strategy is to "destroy democracy from within."Bin Laden's whole game plan is to turn the people of the democratic world against their governments. He thinks democracies are weak because their people, who are more easily frightened than their governments, can bring those governments down.As Saletan puts it earlier in the article:In April 2004, Bin Laden told Europeans, "Vigilant people do...

Can someone give me a good reason why Michael Totten's latest essay is any better than his first published piece? Because, for the life of me, I can't understand what the point of the thing is.Totten argues that Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon is a good precedent for a future US withdrawal from Iraq. The reason? It undermined Hezbollah and has led to a general improvement in Israel's strategic position in Lebanon. Putting aside whether that is...

Like Rodger, I've been reluctant to write anything substantive about the London bombings until we have better information about precisely what happened, and who was involved. Nevertheless, I think some conditional comments are probably in order.For those of you who haven't seen it, John Ikenberry posted a terrific email from Mick Cox - a senior international-relations scholar at the London School of Economics – about the bombings.Rodger's own...

The academic wing of the blogsphere has seen a fair amount of angst, anger, and hand-wringing over the article in the Chronicle for Higher Education, "Bloggers Need not Apply". The anonymous rant, written under the pseudonym "Ivan Tribble" (ah, the irony!), is chock full of stupidiousness goodness. Dan Drezner, Robert Farley, the Bitch herself, and countless others who I might be aware of if I weren't blogging without the benefit of easy...

Prisons are schools of crime. Put a lot of socially deviant people together and they teach each other new tricks. Social scientists studying prisons have been making this argument for decades. I state this from memory: the high school debate topic in 1976-77 (the year I began debating) was on "penal reform."It is widely accepted by both supporters and opponents of the war that Iraq has served as something of a magnet for jihadists (even if many...