Philip Haun’s Coercion, Survival and War: Why Weak States Resist the United States is a much-needed book. After over a decade where the struggle against terrorism dominated policy, conflicts among states—such as the tension between China and Japan over disputed islands or European and U.S. efforts to push back against Russia’s attempts to expand its…
Category: Roundtables
Roundtable 9-15 on The Statebuilder’s Dilemma: On the Limits of Foreign Intervention
It is hard to recapture the confidence, indeed the hubris, which emerged in certain policy circles in 2002 and early 2003, after the United States successfully brought down the Taliban government in Afghanistan and was primed to overrun Iraq. It was not simply neoconservative officials from the George W. Bush administration possessed by delusional visions….
Roundtable 9-14 on Dangerous Trade. Arms Exports, Human Rights, and International Reputation
Jennifer L. Erickson’s Dangerous Trade is a powerful reminder of the manifold ways in which arms control raises the most enduring questions in the study of international politics. The ability to regulate violence capacity on a given territory is central to the very idea of the modern state. The unfettered capacity to wield organized violence…
Roundtable 9-13 on Constructive Illusions: Misperceiving the Origins of International Cooperation
The study of perception and misperception in international relations is often driven by the implicit belief that understanding the source of biased judgments will lead to mutual understanding and better relations between states. But what if cooperation between two states is based on mutual misperception? Is collaboration dependent on positive illusions?
Roundtable 9-12 on Return to Cold War
As President Donald Trump’s administration begins, relations between the United States and Russia make the headlines almost every day. No one seems able to agree on what Russian President Vladimir Putin did or did not do to try to influence the 2016 U.S. elections, much less on what his ultimate aims are. Trump’s own cabinet…
Roundtable on Explanation and Progress in Security Studies: Bridging Theoretical Divides in International Relations
Defining scientific progress in terms of the cumulation of knowledge, predictive power, and an “approach-to-consensus” regarding the best explanation when intellectual disputes arise, Fred Chernoff raises the critically important questions of why is there relatively little progress in the field of security studies as compared to the natural sciences, and why is there more progress…
ISSF Roundtable 9-10 on Power, Knowledge, and Dissent in Morgenthau’s Worldview
In the last fifteen years classical realism has not only become an accepted paradigm but has largely supplanted neorealism. Like all paradigms, it seeks legitimacy by claiming canonical thinkers as its founders. Ancient Greek historian Thucydides and German émigré Hans Morgenthau have been critical in this regard. Post-Cold War interest in Morgenthau transcends his relationship…
Roundtable 9-9 on Endurance and War: The National Sources of Military Cohesion
The study of military effectiveness in political science has come a long way in a short period of time. When I started graduate school in the mid-1990s, most of the key works on the subject were written by historians and sociologists rather than political scientists.[1] Beginning in the late 1990s, however, military effectiveness began to…
Roundtable 9-8 on Reassuring the Reluctant Warriors: U.S. Civil-Military Relations and Multilateral Intervention
Why does the United States, a superpower with the world’s strongest military, go to great lengths to secure multilateral approval from bodies such as the United Nations and NATO for its military interventions? And how might the answer to this question hinge on civil-military relations in Washington—notably, on the U.S. military’s known reluctance to become…
Roundtable 9-7 on Cyber War Versus Cyber Realities: Cyber Conflict in the International System
It is great pleasure to write an introduction to this roundtable on Cyber War Versus Cyber Realities by Brando Valeriano and Ryan Maness. This is an important book, one of the very few that addresses the new cyber age from a theoretical as well as an empirical perspective. The reviews are written by notable scholars…