American political scientists who perform case studies straddle two very different strategies of inquiry. On the one hand, they seek to understand politics in terms of narratives that explore closely the events in a single historical episode. On the other, they work within a disciplinary framework that emphasizes the statement of general theories, the treatment…
Author: Timothy McKeown
Roundtable 8-15 on A Sense of Power: The Roots of America’s Global Role
John Thompson has been thinking deeply about American politics and foreign policy for almost fifty years. Previously, he has written luminously about the Progressive era and Woodrow Wilson. Now, he has integrated the conclusions of several important articles that he has written over the years and congealed his thinking about the motivations undergirding America’s assumption…
Roundtable 8-14 on Democracy Promotion, National Security and Strategy: Foreign Policy under the Reagan Administration
In Democracy Promotion, National Security and Strategy: Foreign Policy under the Reagan Administration, Robert Pee explores the United States’ attempts to promote democracy abroad during the Reagan administration. The title of Pee’s book captures a central challenge Washington faced with this issue not only during the 1980s but also throughout the Cold War after 1945….
Article Review 55 on “Process Tracing: A Symposium.” Security Studies 24:2
For scholars engaging in qualitative analysis, the concept of ‘process tracing’ comes in many shapes and forms. In its most basic form, process tracing refers to a set of procedures that uses qualitative evidence in an attempt to establish a causal relationship between one or more explanatory variables and a dependent variable. Notwithstanding the common…
Article Review 54 on “Analytic Outreach for Intelligence: Insights from a Workshop on Emerging Biotechnology Threats.”
What are preferred ways for members of the academic community to undertake analytic outreach with their counterparts in the intelligence community on important issues, such as emerging biotechnology threats? What are the impediments and opportunities most likely to shape a productive engagement between academic scholars and intelligence analysts on the topics of assessing biotechnology trends…
Review Essay 29 on The Bomb: South Africa’s Nuclear Program
Nic von Wielligh’s new book on the history of the South African nuclear project is a timely contribution to the on-going scholarly debate on why and how countries choose to develop, maintain and dismantle nuclear weapons programs. Since South Africa is the only country to date that has undergone a voluntary complete nuclear roll-back, its…
Roundtable 8-13 on Gendering Global Conflict: Toward a Feminist Theory of War
Laura Sjoberg’s important book, Gendering Global Conflict, engages a wealth of both traditional and contemporary ‘war studies’ (as Sjoberg phrases them) to lay bare the theoretical gaps caused by omitting gender from our explanations of why individuals and collectivities fight. As Sjoberg convincingly argues, scholars cannot understand the causes and consequences of conflict and…
Journal Origins Essay (Essay 28) on “The Genesis of JoGSS (the Journal of Global Security Studies).”
JoGSS is a new security journal in the International Studies Association’s (ISA) stable of journals. Frank Gavin asked me to write a brief essay for ISSF on the origins and foundation of this new journal, which aims “to publish first-rate work addressing the variety of methodological, epistemological, theoretical, normative, and empirical concerns reflected in the…
Roundtable 8-12 on Democratic Militarism: Voting, Wealth, and War
Jonathan Caverley challenges our image of democracies – and mass publics – as being relatively averse to war. The costs of war, he correctly argues, are not distributed evenly across all citizens. Those who are taxed less heavily than others or do not serve in the military, he reasons, will be less averse to war…
Article Review 53 on “Accepting Regional Zero: Nuclear Weapon Free Zones, U.S. Nonproliferation Policy and Global Security, 1957-1968.” Journal of Cold War Studies 17:2
James Stocker offers a deep historical analysis of U.S. foreign policy towards regional nuclear weapons free zones (NWFZs) during the tenure of three American presidents — Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson— and maps its evolution over eleven years of pre-détente Cold War. He examines how the Eisenhower administration rejected the…