H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum Roundtable Review 15-13 Frank Costigliola, Kennan. A Life between Worlds. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023. ISBN 9780691165400 (hardcover, $ 39.95) 13 November 2023 |PDF: https://issforum.org/to/jrt15-13 | Website: rjissf.org | Twitter: @HDiplo Editor: Diane Labrosse Commissioning Editor: Sarah-Jane Corke Production Editor: Christopher Ball Copy Editor: Bethany Keenan…
Jeff Colgan is a political scientist with an expertise in international oil politics and oil-related conflicts.[1] Colgan’s Partial Hegemony deals cleverly with oil and climate change, working to conceptualize and systematize these two issues by using the analytical category of “subsystems.” Subsystems are managed by different actors (both states and private entities), and are enforced…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 15-12 on Verney A Great and Rising Nation
“What made them do it? I wish I knew. One quality all these mariners had in common…was restlessness,” observed “sailor-historian” Samuel Eliot Morison in introducing The Southern Voyages, the second volume of his magisterial study, The European Discovery of America.[1] A man of his times, a scholar who knew a thing or two about both…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Review Essay 82: James on Goldgeier & Shifrinson, eds., Evaluating NATO Enlargement
This interesting and important collections of essays on the enlargement of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and its consequences appeared at a historic moment, in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s full-scale attack of Ukraine on 24 February 2022.[1] It is a development—and to some extent an adjustment—of the papers that were published as a…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Forum (44) on the Scholarship and Legacy of Leo Ribuffo
Leo Ribuffo (1945–2018) joined the George Washington University History Department in 1973. He remained a faculty member there up until his passing in November 2018. He came to be, particularly in response to his The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War (1983), one of the leading…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 15-11 on Wellerstein, Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States
Alex Wellerstein’s Restricted Data is an extensive and impressive study of the organisational production of nuclear secrecy in the United States. The overarching rationale of Restricted Data is to trace the development of the political, social, and organisational mechanisms which limited the spread of the scientific and technical knowledge of the nuclear technology. The aim…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Essay 531: Alison R. Holmes on Learning the Scholar’s Craft
You could say I carry a genetic predilection for the living and teaching of international affairs as I am essentially the product of fin de siècle globalization. With grandparents and parents who lived the turmoil of war and chaos at the turn of the twentieth century and having seen for myself a world in crisis…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Review Essay 81: Schepers on Hecker, Hinge Points
Hinge Points is a narrative of missed diplomatic opportunities to constrain North Korea’s nuclear weapons program over the last seventeen years. Its author, Siegfried Hecker, is a nuclear scientist, professor at Stanford University, and former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory. Together with his former research assistant at Stanford University, Elliot Serbin, he describes six…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Commentary: “From Disengagement to Unprecedented Engagement: the US, the War in Gaza and the New World Order”
Is it just a coincidence that at the same time as President Joe Biden’s wartime visit to Israel, the Chinese and Russian leaders met in Beijing in the framework of the Belt and Road Conference? While the timing might be a coincidence, the contrast between the two events indicates some of the links between the…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 15-10 on Chan, Rumbles of Thunder
With the recent return of great-power politics, we are also seeing a resurrection of power transition, a realist theory in international relations.[1] Positing an inevitable war between the reigning power and the contending state, power transition seems well suited to explain the unrelenting competition between the United States and China in the last few years….