Just over a decade ago, in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse and the sudden revelation of new documents from the former communist countries, Cold War scholars were particularly keen to de-center their studies. By this, they meant internationalizing what they did, shifting the focus away from Washington, and not only exploring what went…
Category: Roundtables
Roundtable 1-3 on The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War
Nicholas Thompson has taken an imaginative approach to the Cold War by presenting a comparative study of the public careers of Paul Nitze and George Kennan, two significant U.S. officials who participated in the Cold War from its post-WWII origins to its surprising conclusion. With access to the records of his grandfather, Nitze, and the…
Roundtable 1-2 on “Politics and Scholarship”
Almost without exception, students of security policy are not only analysts and proponents of abstract theories, they are also deeply concerned with issues of contemporary international politics and have strong policy preferences. There are likely to be connections here, and it is by no means obvious that the latter are subservient to the former. With…
Roundtable 1-1 on “Biology and Security”
This roundtable broadly addresses the application of recent developments in biology, behavior genetics and neuroscience to topics in international relations and security studies. Advances in the life sciences have been applied to topics in political science; most of those applications have been restricted to the realm of voting behavior and public opinion broadly construed[1]. However,…