In her new signal history that spans early modern science, the positivism of the Russian Revolution, Cold War cybernetics, and ends with the post-Soviet period, Eglė Rindzevičiūtė has accomplished something extraordinary, as is affirmed by this roundtable of experts and scholarly specialists. In The Will to Predict: Orchestrating the Future through Science, she outlines a serious history…
Category: Roundtables
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-12 on Daly, Violent Victors
In Violent Victors, Sarah Zukerman Daly poses a question crucial to understanding what happens as countries emerge from civil war: Why does the winning side, whose hands are often stained with the blood of wartime atrocities, so often win the first postwar election? Daly’s answer is at once surprising and intuitive: beleaguered citizens, having endured…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-11 on Hunt, The Nuclear Club
The contemporary nuclear order and the status of the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which stands at its core, have never been more critical or under siege. Between Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling over the war in Ukraine, North Korea’s nuclear build-up, and developments in the Iranian nuclear program, our need to understand nuclear…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-10 on Tama, Bipartisanship & US Foreign Policy
On 8 May 2024, as I was sitting down to write this introduction, an unusual event was unfolding at the United States Capitol: 163 Democrats joined with 196 Republicans to kill a motion to oust Representative. Mike Johnson (R-LA) as Speaker of the House. The effort to remove Johnson, which was sparked by members of…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-9 on Kirshner, An Unwritten Future
Jonathan Kirshner’s stimulating book wages a two-front battle against the corrosive effects of hubris in international relations: first against the arrogance of power that has repeatedly led to tragic imperial overstretch as first described in Thucydides’s account of the Peloponnesian Wars, and second against the arrogance of social-scientific overstretch in the vain pursuit of valid…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-8 on Brew. Petroleum and Progress in Iran
For nearly half a century, the United States has tried to hobble the Iranian economy. The Carter administration first imposed sanctions in the wake of the 1979 American embassy takeover. Despite some periods of détente, like the Mohammad Khatami presidency of 1997-2004 and the immediate aftermath of the 2015 nuclear deal, the general trend has…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-7 on Gage, G-Man
In her seminal biography of J. Edgar Hoover, historian Beverly Gage writes, “to look at [Hoover] is also to look at ourselves, at what Americans valued and fought over during those years, what we tolerated and what we refused to see” (xxi). This is the crux of her argument, for which she weaves a magnificent…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-6 on Freeman, Dreams for a Decade
In today’s context of heightened nuclear dangers, nuclear disarmament may seem like a faraway dream. Today’s nuclear landscape is characterized by threats of nuclear use, states modernizing and sometimes expanding their nuclear arsenals, violations and withdrawals from arms control treaties, and the possibilities of new states developing nuclear weapons. The prospects for arms reductions, let…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-5 on Ashford, Oil, the State, and War
It is a pleasure to introduce the roundtable on Emma Ashford’s Oil, the State, and War. Ashford is one of the more distinctive voices in the rethinking US foreign policy “space,” as we say now, a columnist at Foreign Policy, and self-defined heterodox theorist. Her book confirms it. All three reviewers agree that it is…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-4 on Painter & Brew, The Struggle for Iran
In The Struggle for Iran, David Painter and Gregory Brew analyze the complex set of affairs that eventually led to the August 1953 coup against the government of Mohammad Mosaddeq, with a sharp causal focus on the interplay of Cold War logic and oil control. The reviews that follow mostly praise the authors for deploying…