California and Canada have some things in common, extending far beyond the trivial fact that each political entity sports in its name the same two first letters. They are, for starters, similarly sized demographic entities, Canada’s 35 million or so people nearly matching California’s 39 million. They are each considered, with reason, to be multicultural,…
Policy Series: The Significance of the Trump Presidency
Those that did not foresee the likelihood or even the possibility of Donald Trump’s victory are going to find it hard to discipline themselves to a balanced projection of his forthcoming first term. To ardent liberals in the United States – not least most of those at the leading American universities – at worst it…
Policy Series: The Impact of the Trump Administration on U.S.-UK Relations
This essay is being written at the end of 2016, with the topic stimulating a series of reactions: bewilderment, then bemusement, then apprehension, then uncertainty, and, finally, curiosity. If President-elect Donald Trump himself knows what he truly plans to do – as opposed to what he would truly like to do – he has hidden…
Article Review 67 on “Wither the Balancers? The Case for a Methodological Reset” and on “States, Nations, and Territorial Stability: Why Chinese Hegemony Would Be Better for International Order.”
Adam Liff’s “Whither the Balancers? The Case for a Methodological Reset” and Ryan Griffith’s “States, Nations, and Territorial Stability: Why Chinese Hegemony Would Be Better for International Order” seek to re-examine several foundational concepts in international relations scholarship. Liff argues for a more conceptually rigorous and standardized specification of balancing that sufficiently accounts for contemporary…
Policy Series: Donald Trump and the Limits of Human Rights
The international human rights system, with its diverse global movements, is epoch-making, allowing stigma to be applied to errant states on matters of crucial global concern.[2] But promoting its exclusive relevance in the face of injustice, as if the alternative were apathy or despair, is simply not going to cut it.
Policy Series: Human Rights and the Trump Administration
Don’t tell me it doesn’t work—torture works,” then presidential candidate Donald Trump said at a February 2016 campaign event in Bluffton, South Carolina. “Okay, folks, Torture—you know, half these guys [say]: ‘Torture doesn’t work.’ Believe me, it works, Okay?”[1] Whether or not the President-elect’s promise of a return to Bush era waterboarding (or forced deportations…
Article Review 66 on “The Cold War, the developing world, and the creation of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), 1953–1957”
When the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was created sixty years ago, it was presented as a development agency turning nuclear swords into ploughshares. A small group of nuclear ‘haves’ negotiated the IAEA Statute between 1953 and 1957, securing privileged positions for themselves. Less-developed states were largely ignored during this process. Unsurprisingly, nuclear haves (states…
Policy Series: Trump The Tweeter
If Hilary Clinton had been elected President it would have been a relatively easy to describe her foreign policy commitments, preferences, and likely responses to possible challenges. She is on record at some length on numerous issues as Senator, Secretary of State, and Democratic presidential candidate. Trump, by contrast, is a newcomer to the policy…
Forum 15 on “Symposium on Counterfactual Analysis”
The essays by Niall Ferguson and Benjamin Mueller are welcome commentaries on the Security Studies “Symposium on Counterfactual Analysis.” The symposium was one of four collections published in the journal in 2015 and 2016, each of which sought to refresh scholars’ understandings of a particular approach to qualitative and multi-method inquiry. The symposia followed from…
ISSF Roundtable 9-10 on Power, Knowledge, and Dissent in Morgenthau’s Worldview
In the last fifteen years classical realism has not only become an accepted paradigm but has largely supplanted neorealism. Like all paradigms, it seeks legitimacy by claiming canonical thinkers as its founders. Ancient Greek historian Thucydides and German émigré Hans Morgenthau have been critical in this regard. Post-Cold War interest in Morgenthau transcends his relationship…