Scholars have long studied the causes of World War One. More recently, they have focused on events and processes which occurred after the outbreak of hostilities, including military intervention, war fighting strategies, and especially the war’s duration. In particular, research has explored why the Central Powers and the Entente were unable to reach a peace…
Roundtable 9-3 on Barriers to Bioweapons: The Challenges of Expertise and Weapons Development
Sonia Ben Ouagrham-Gormley’s outstanding Barriers to Bioweapons demonstrates that while it may be relatively easy to pick your poison, there are very significant barriers to manufacturing it. Her main argument, as our reviewers so clearly explain, is that making bioweapons—that is, ‘weaponizing’ biological agents such as anthrax, smallpox, plague, and many others—has been far more…
Policy Roundtable 1-2 on Brexit
When British voters chose to leave the European Union in a 23 June 2016 referendum, they unleashed an intense and ongoing national debate over the consequences. Not surprisingly, the debate has largely surrounded the economic, political, and social consequences of “Brexit.” Those in favour of leaving emphasized the benefits of independence from what they saw…
Roundtable 9-2 on Diplomacy’s Value: Creating Security in 1920’s Europe and the Contemporary Middle East
It seems obvious that an understanding of the nature and value of diplomacy should be of central importance to the study of international relations. However, as Brian Rathbun argues in his important new book, the sad reality is that international relations theorists have devoted little time or attention to systematically exploring the value of diplomacy….
Roundtable 9-1 on Chinese Hegemony: Grand Strategy and International Institutions in East Asian History
It is a pleasure to read Feng Zhang’s Chinese Hegemony: Grand Strategy and International Institutions in East Asian History. This book is an exemplar in its serious treatment of Chinese history, its holistic approach to East Asian history covering Inner Asia as well as Korea and Japan, its simultaneous analysis of the foreign policy strategies…
Policy Roundtable 1-1 on the Chilcot Inquiry
When released in July 2016, The Report of the Iraq Inquiry elicited the familiar reactions to other government post-mortems about a controversial policy.[2] People noted its size and demanded to know what was new. When few ‘sensational’ details emerged, most observers concluded that the report confirmed what they already believed–good and bad.
Introducing ISSF Policy Roundtables
A Note from the H-Diplo/ISSF Policy Roundtable Editors Imagine the best panel discussion or listserv conversation, where experienced professionals strip away academic jargon and get to the heart of debates over current security controversies. H-Diplo wants to capture the essence of these conversations in a new series, the International Security Studies Forum Policy Roundtable. The…
Article Review Forum 59 on “How Realism Waltzed Off: Liberalism and Decisionmaking in Kenneth Waltz’s Neorealism.”
Where do new theories come from? In his landmark Theory of International Politics, Kenneth Waltz suggested that “the long process of painful trial and error will not lead to the construction of a theory unless at some point a brilliant intuition flashes, a creative idea emerges. One cannot say how the intuition comes and how…
Roundtable 8-19 on Near and Distant Neighbors: A New History of Soviet Intelligence
If intelligence has now received sufficient attention so that it is no longer the hidden dimension of international politics, Soviet intelligence still fits this categorization. Our three reviewers welcome Jonathan Haslam’s lively overview of the subject and commend him for drawing on so many of the documents which, although revealing as far as they go,…
Roundtable 8-18 on The Taming of Democracy Assistance: Why Democracy Promotion Does Not Confront Dictators
Every year scores of official aid agencies, foreign ministries, international organizations, transnational non-governmental organizations, private foundations, and for-profit development organizations design, fund, and implement thousands of projects aimed at advancing democracy in over one hundred countries, spending somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 billion. Multiply this annual activity by the fact that such assistance has…