This roundtable is a rarity, not for the H-Diplo/ISSF Roundtable Review series, of course, but for roundtables published in many journals and online fora; it begins with a serious, well-written book and continues with three serious, well-written, critical review essays. There is not a clunker in the mix. The complete package is a model for…
Category: Roundtables
Roundtable 13-10 on Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War
Samuel Moyn raises many questions in his new, provocative book, Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War. The four reviews, by Anne Kornhauser, Jana K. Lipman, Tejasvi Nagaraja, and Scott D. Sagan, engage deeply, appreciatively, and critically with Moyn’s work. For Nagaraja the book’s key question is, “how the post-9/11 Forever War…
Roundtable 13-9 on Arms Control for the Third Nuclear Age: Between Disarmament and Armageddon
Since the dawn of the nuclear age, three distinct approaches to nuclear strategy – disarmament, denial, and deterrence – have waxed and waned in importance as guides to US doctrine and policy.[1] Although champions of each of these approaches sometimes defend their position as if it represented the one true religion, each of these strategies…
Roundtable 13-8 on How Insurgency Begins: Rebel Group Formation in Uganda and Beyond
The fundamental problem for insurgent groups is military poverty: they are weaker and poorer than the states they seek to overthrow. Efforts to increase their strength in numbers means exposing themselves to the state’s security forces. This creates a paradox: insurgents cannot radically revise the political status quo without growing, but the act of growing…
Roundtable 13-7 on The False Promise of Liberal Order
The classic international relations debate between realism and liberalism has long been seen as rather old hat, if not reactionary, by scholars who are interested in new ways of understanding IR. Yet in a post-Cold War world of American unipolar preponderance this dusty debate has taken on a new and unexpected angle.
Roundtable 13-6 on Scorecard Diplomacy: Grading States to Influence their Reputation and Behavior
What convinces a country to adopt policies it might have previously eschewed as unimportant or against its interests? In practice, the global governance toolbox is notoriously limited. States, international organizations, and Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that want other actors to change their behavior are typically reduced to selecting between the unsatisfying options of economic sanctions, military…
Roundtable 13-5 on Tempting Fate: Why Nonnuclear States Confront Nuclear Opponents
For over seventy years, the policy and academic communities have debated the effects of nuclear weapons on interstate relations. In this saturated field of study, there is little consensus except that a nuclear war would be devastating and that nuclear weapons aren’t going away any time soon.
Policy Series 2021-58: Liberal Internationalism and Partisan Discontents into the Post-Trump United States
We completed this article in September 2021, just as the Taliban defeated the American-supported government of Afghanistan, and the United States worked to transport all of its citizens out of the country along with the people of Afghanistan who worked for and with its troops, contractors, and officials. On the liberal internationalism front, this is…
Roundtable 13-4 on Black Gold and Blackmail: Oil and Great Power Politics and on The Oil Wars Myth: Petroleum and the Causes of International Conflict
Rosemary A. Kelanic’s, Black Gold and Blackmail: Oil and Great Power Politics and Emily Meierding’s, The Oil Wars Myth: Petroleum and the Causes of International Conflict are deeply engaging and important books that advance our knowledge on the politics of energy security.[1] Both books challenge many existing assumptions on the role of oil in international…
H-Diplo Roundtable XXIII-11 on The Revolution that Failed: Nuclear Competition, Arms Control, and the Cold War
Do nuclear weapons revolutionize world politics? For decades, the standard answer from international relations scholars has been a resounding yes. This mainstream view, known as ‘The Theory of the Nuclear Revolution,’ is associated with scholars such as Kenneth Waltz, Robert Jervis, and Charles Glaser. [1]It argues that nuclear weapons generate a condition of mutual vulnerability that…
