Not many historians associated with SHAFR would venture a study of President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq based largely on interviews with the engineers of that ultimately disastrous enterprise. Fewer still and, really, only one such foreign relations historian could emerge from this challenge with an untarnished reputation. While not totally convincing the H-Diplo…
Category: Roundtables
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 15-5 on Ghalehdar, The Origins of Overthrow
In his fascinating new book, The Origins of Overthrow: How Emotional Frustration Shapes US Regime Change Interventions, Payam Ghalehdar discusses a private letter President Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Henry White, who was the American Ambassador in Rome. The letter was posted two weeks before Roosevelt sent 2,000 United States Marines to establish a new provisional…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 15-4 on Ro’i, The Bleeding Wound
Among the unanswered—and perhaps unanswerable—questions regarding the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan is the extent to which the conflict contributed to the USSR’s dissolution less than three years after the withdrawal of Moscow’s forces. Proponents of the view that the war had precipitated the Soviet collapse included CIA analysts like Anthony Arnold, who argued…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 15-3 on Zarkol, Before the West
I have the honor to introduce this roundtable on Ayşe Zarakol’s Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders, a book that challenges International Relation’s (IR) Eurocentric focus on Westphalia as the beginning of International Relations by foregrounding the “Chinggisid sovereignty model.” According to Zarakol, the Mongol leader Genghis Khan’s world conquest…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable on Zubok Collapse
Vladislav Zubok was a witness to the end of the Soviet Union, and with this impressive book, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union, he has become one of, if not the, leading historians of its downfall. His distinguished academic career began at Moscow State University and the prestigious Institute for the USA and Canada…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 15-1 on Goscha, The Road to Dien Bien Phu
How was the Vietnamese Communist state formed? In Christopher Goscha’s The Road to Dien Bien Phu, that state was initially an “archipelago state” (1945–49)—“archipelago” in the sense of both its territorial shape and its coalitional politics—which then transformed into a “War Communist state” (since 1950), one that was dominated at the core by the Communist…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 14-30 on Owens & Rietzler, Women’s International Thought
This roundtable discusses a laborious effort to write women back in the history of international thought and expand the cannon of IR in interesting new directions. But this is not only an exercise in recovery. It is also a consistent effort to understand why it is that women have been marginalized in the historiography of…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 29 on Powell, France’s Wars in Chad
On 27 February 2023, French President Emmanuel Macron delivered a speech on the future of Franco-African relations. The proposed changes represented a fundamental reorientation of French activity on the continent, and would represent a major departure from French policy over the past 70 years. Among other changes, Macron pledged to drastically reduce France’s military presence,…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable on Kennedy, Victory at Sea
Paul Kennedy’s Victory at Sea: Naval Power and the Transformation of the Global Order in World War II, with illustrations by Kennedy’s collaborator, Ian Marshall, may mislead purchasers who are not familiar with Kennedy’s award-winning scholarship into thinking they are purchasing a “coffee table book with excellent artwork.”[1] Instead, Kennedy offers a persuasive study of…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable on Kisangani & Pickering African Interventions
Emizet F. Kisangani and Jeffrey Pickering have written a groundbreaking analysis of African international relations. As a historian of international history, with a particular interest in Africa, who also teaches courses on International Relations Theory (IR) I can only applaud its appearance. Increasingly my colleagues, who combine international history and IR theory, and I are…