In late August 2021, Afghans huddled in military airplanes amidst a massive evacuation. Crowds at the airport gates were denied access, then targeted by suicide bombers. These dramatic images encapsulate how security studies scholars typically view migration: refugees as a collateral consequence of conflict; innocent women and children in need of humanitarian assistance; asylum applicants…
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…
Article Review 154- “The Durability of a Unipolar System”
In his recent article in Security Studies, Yuan-kang Wang tackles a vitally important question in international relations: is unipolarity durable?[1] Two opposing views can be derived from the extant literature. Declinists posit that unipolarity is doomed due to the formation of counter-unipolar balancing coalitions, the unipole’s imperial overstretch, and the uneven growth rate between the…
H-Diplo Essay 400- Danielle Fosler-Lussier on Learning the Scholar’s Craft
I came to diplomatic history when the methods and knowledge base of my home discipline, musicology, were not quite sufficient to answer the questions I needed to ask. I am still a musicologist. But my engagement with diplomatic history, and with history more broadly, has been formative for my work. I believe, too, that musicology…
Forum 31 on the Importance of the Scholarship of Ernest May
For a half-century, from 1959 until his death in 2009, Ernest May was in the front rank of historians studying the interactions of the United States with the world. He left an enormous and fascinatingly readable body of work and touched many lives. That is perhaps why this forum stimulated such a remarkable and contrasting…
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.
H-Diplo Essay 397- Sheila Fitzpatrick on Learning the Scholar’s Craft
Becoming a historian was perhaps over-determined in my family. My father, Brian Fitzpatrick, wrote books on Australian economic and labour history; my mother Dorothy taught history; and my younger brother, David Fitzpatrick, would become a distinguished historian (of twentieth-century Ireland) in his turn. But both David and I tried at first to avoid our fate,…
Obituary for Robert Jervis (30 April 1940-9 December 2021)
The H-Diplo and ISSF editors are deeply saddened by the passing of Bob Jervis, a distinguished and award-winning scholar who was also well known for his limitless kindness and generosity (and sense of humor). Bob was a longstanding contributor to and supporter of H-Diplo. In 2009, in partnership with the H-Diplo editors, he founded the…
Article Review 153 on “The Obama Administration and Syrian Chemical Weapons: Deterrence, Compellence, and the Limits of the “Resolve plus Bombs” Formula.”
In this article Wyn Bown, Jeffrey Knopf, and Matthew Moran examine Syria’s possession and use of chemical weapons (CW) and third-party response. In this context, they assess how compellence succeeded in Syria when deterrent efforts had initially failed. President Barack Obama had set a ‘red line’ that signaled U.S. commitment to punish the Syrian regime…
H-Diplo Essay 395- Eliot A. Cohen on Learning the Scholar’s Craft
My career has been, I suppose, that of a changeling – an historian trapped in a political scientist’s body, an occasional bureaucrat and diplomat, a Dean and a pundit. My field has been that of ‘hard,’ i.e., military national security, but also military history, and some topics much further afield, to include a current project…
