This guest post is by Joseph O’Mahoney, currently a Stanton Fellow at MIT and an Assistant Professor in Seton Hall’s School of Diplomacy and International Relations. In the US, support for President Donald Trump’s executive order, which restricts travel to the US by...
On Facebook, someone familiar to readers of this blog wrote: "As readers of Weber know, there are three forms of legitimate rape: forcible, fraternity, and rational-legal." But enough of that...
Photo credit: lhgszch on Flickr.Back in December 2009, I wrote a post for the Duck called "Wal-mart Isn't Green." Jared Diamond had written a provocative op-ed about various green business...
Last week, at University of Bristol, I gave a talk called "The Future of World Order" to the student International Affairs Society. It was a speculative lecture, based on my 17 years directing the...
Gerard Toal and Gerry Kearns (both of Virginia Tech) threw a great little academic bash today: GEOPOL 2010, keynoted by a lunchtime presentation by Derek Gregory on "War Cultures" that was, among, other things, a marvelous demolition of the idea that "our" techno-strategic wars are clean and precise while "their" new wars are messy and imhumane. I had to leave before the day was over, but this morning I was on a panel entitled "Geopolitics and Empire" for which I had the standard "academic 10 minutes" (which means: about 15 minutes) to say something hopefully interesting. So, naturally, I...
Last night, over a good meal, two Department colleagues and I talked with several out-of-town guests for quite some time about the prolonged war in Afghanistan. Eventually, I happened to make a point that a fellow blogger said seemed novel and interesting -- certainly worthy of a blog post.Let's see if anyone agrees.As many experts note, the war in Afghanistan is prolonged in large part because too much of the local population sees the U.S.-NATO intervention as illegitimate. Regardless of good intentions, Americans are seen as unwanted foreign invaders. Moreover, even U.S. Generals concede...
The question of state capacity might be one of, if not the, most important question that academics and policy makers can tackle. When we talk about local, regional, and international stability, failed states, etc, often times the major problem is a lack of capacity by a state to control what goes on within its borders. State capacity is the product of numerous variables, including legitimacy, material resources, government coherence, coercive capacity, and autonomy vis-a-vis international actors. And while state capacity is seemingly a critical issue in global politics, policy makers and...
Forty years ago today, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first humans to set foot on the Moon. Michael Griffin, former NASA Administrator, observed:What is most striking about this 40th anniversary of the first human landing on the moon is that we can no longer do what we're celebrating. Not "do not choose to," but "can't."By the 40th anniversary of the Lewis and Clark expedition, the Oregon Trail was carrying settlers to the West. By the 40th anniversary of the completion of the transcontinental railroad, a web of rail traffic crisscrossed the continent. By the 40th anniversary of...
As the incredible events in Iran unfold--in the streets of Tehran and on Twitter--the obvious question is: is this the 'Green Revolution' or something else for which we don't have a pre-fab category.I would call your attention to two outstanding posts that give a very good insight into what to watch for. The unifying theme was perhaps best articulated by an anonymous Iranian commentator at Salon: "Legitimacy, much debated by social scientists, actually turns out to matter. It's not just force that rules..." (h/t). In short, this is a moment of contentious politics* where the legitimacy of...
Joshua Kurlantzick recently argued that the global economic downturn might spell doom for a number of autocratic governments around the world. Most, he argues, have staked their legitimacy on economic performance. Dramaticaly reduced world demand for consumer goods and energy threatens states like China, Russia, and Venezuela (and perhaps also Iran and other OPEC states): Modern autocracies are very different from those of the past. Rather than ruling by strict ideology, ruthless internal police, and tight control of information, authoritarian regimes like Beijing and Moscow have remained in...
(or why Patrick shouldn’t worry just yet)This is morning, one thing is clear: Barack Obama has won a clear majority of both electoral and popular votes. The polls were not all that far off on the final total, ending up with a respectable record of what states went for which candidate.But to read nearly every major news outlet, publication, and blog this morning, you’d never know it—in an instant, everyone has moved on to the more important question of the hour, “What does this all mean?” Does Obama have a mandate, and what is that mandate? Mandates are about meaning, and mandates, like...
Last week (September 26th), I commented on Dan's post on "Realism and Constructivism" by writing this:"Critical" constructivists are in many ways realist-constructivists. They argue that material power and self interest typically shape outcomes, but they (normatively) want ideational factors to have a predominant role. It is a transformation from brute force to the "forceless force of the better argument."Of course, critical theorists need not embrace all realist descriptions of world politics. It is possible, for instance, to imagine all sorts of worrisome coercion that need not emerge from...