Sabah Mofidi is a postdoctoral researcher in the Political Science Department at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on Kurdistan's political history, political identity and the relationship between religion and politics.
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What to Do About Clausewitz: Saving Strategic Studies From Itself
“A specter is haunting strategic studies—the specter of peace.” These bizarre words are from Richard Betts, who provocatively presented peace itself as a problem in a largely forgotten article from 1997 asking, “Should Strategic Studies Survive?” Betts answered his title question in the affirmative. As one of the most prominent scholars that strategic studies has ever produced, it’s unsurprising Betts would come to the field’s...
Jamie Frueh
Associate Provost and W. Harold Row Professor of Global Politics Jamie Frueh, of Bridgewater College, joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast. Jamie and Brent have been friends for over 15 years, meeting at the ISA-Northeast conference in 2009. Jamie is also the only (other) person on this podcast besides Brent who is from Iowa; Jamie also hosts his own podcast, The Teaching Curve. Jamie talks about growing up in Des Moines, with parents who both...
And All That Jezebel
Ah, the avalanche of racism and misogyny that came after the Kamala Harris announcement. The “Kamala is not really black” narrative has been dissected by Adam Serwer in great detail. Spoiler alert: all of these “DEI” discussions are inherently racist and white supremacist because they assume that a person of color is unable to succeed in the same way as a white person. Even though so far the GOP has focused on cats, biological children,...
Was the Trump shooting terrorism?
The implications of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump over the weekend remain unclear. Will it lead him to strike a more conciliatory tone during the upcoming Republican National Convention? Will it make more Americans sympathize with him? And then there are the questions of what led to the shooting. Why did this individual try to kill Trump? These questions were intensified by the news that the US Federal Bureau of Investigation...
Bloody Carnival
A lot of ink has been spilled and bytes spent on the reflections over Trump's failed assassination this past weekend. I won't pretend I know better, although as a regular academic that's kind of my job and an occupational hazard. But as soon as my co-author texted me about the events in Butler, PA, I responded that a carnival usually ends with the execution of the mock-king. Once more details started to come in, especially about the identity of...
The Munich Agreement, but Negotiated by Oswald Mosley
When I was but a lad, it was still quite common for foreign-policy hawks to invoke “Munich” as an all-purpose rebuttal to compromise with (they would say the “appeasement of”) rival states, most notably the Soviet Union. The failure of the 1938 agreement — which handed Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia in an effort to avoid a general European war. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain infamously...
The Frontier Politics of Horizon
In the recent Settling for Less: Why States Colonize and Why They Stop, Lachlan McNamee makes a rationalist argument—“colonization projects” are “characterized by a triangle of actors—settlers, indigenes, and the central state,” and for his purposes, we can “assume that all settler migration is voluntary and economically driven”. McNamee is not the only one with such a reading of colonial politics. Director, co-writer, and star Kevin Costner...
6 + 1 Questions about “Compliance in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights”
1. What is the name of the article and what are its coordinates? Aníbal Pérez-Liñán and Angie García Atehortúa. 2024. “Oversight Hearings, Stakeholder Engagement, and Compliance in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.” International Organization. 2. What’s the argument? Compliance with international law is hardly guaranteed. International bodies can secure greater compliance with their decisions by requesting regular reports from relevant...
Angie García Atehortúa
Angie K. García Atehortúa is a human rights and criminal lawyer based in The Hague.
Anibal Pérez-Liñán
Aníbal Pérez-Liñán is Professor of Political Science and Global Affairs, and Director of the Kellogg Institute for International Studies. His work focuses on democratization, political institutions, executive-legislative relations, and the rule of law. He is the author of Presidential Impeachment and the New Political Instability in Latin America and of Democracies and Dictatorships in Latin America: Emergence, Survival, and Fall (with Scott...
Eurovision suggests both sides on Israel-Palestine need to invest in some public diplomacy
Last year I was on a sabbatical in Edinburgh, and my family and I watched Eurovision for the first time. We loved the out-there electro-pop versions of local folk music, got bored by the slow ballads, and generally bought into the hype. This year, we were excited to discover it was streaming for US audiences on Peacock, and watched again. I assumed there would be some tensions over Israel's participation, and was right. There were protests both...