I very much enjoyed reading the four contributions to this roundtable. The theme that runs through all four is the different journeys, taken by different people, that nonetheless led to similar conclusions about how we can teach International Relations (IR). Underlying all this, for me at least, is a disquieting feeling that, over the last…
Category: Roundtables
Roundtable 14-2 on The Frontlines of Peace: An Insider’s Guide to Changing the World
Promoting peace is something everyone endorses – from the United Nations to rich foundations to idealistic schoolchildren. But what is peace? How does it unfold? How can those who want to promote it help? In a book that is more revolutionary than its straightforward language belies, Séverine Autesserre wants to change how we answer each…
Roundtable 14-1 on Why Nations Rise: Narratives and the Path to Great Power
“Is China Rising”? When Sheena Chestnut Greitens and Iain Johnston posed this question in 2009, it seemed beside the point.[1] Everyone knew China was rising. But when Chestnut Greitens and Johnston parsed the discourse to see what analysts meant by “rising,” they discovered a baffling array of meanings. Translating these different definitions into indicators, they…
Roundtable 13-13 on Armed Guests: Territorial Sovereignty and Foreign Military Basing
Since the end of World War II, the US has relied on a vast network of military bases to project its power across the globe. So ubiquitous are these bases that they often melt into the background of US grand strategy, and are treated “as part of the given background conditions on which contemporary international…
Roundtable 13-12 on Restraint in International Politics
Manners constitute a restraint.[1] Toward the end of Second World War, the British defense intellectual Basil Liddell Hart began publishing extensively on fashion and manners. In part, this reflected his much-diminished standing in policy circles: personal scandal, an emotional breakdown, and political maneuverings had taken their toll on Britain’s one-time ‘unofficial Chief of the Imperial…
Roundtable 13-11 on Grand Strategy from Truman to Trump
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…
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.