Why does the United States, a superpower with the world’s strongest military, go to great lengths to secure multilateral approval from bodies such as the United Nations and NATO for its military interventions? And how might the answer to this question hinge on civil-military relations in Washington—notably, on the U.S. military’s known reluctance to become…
Article Review 64 on Special Forum on Oil, Security Studies 25:2
What do states do when faced with the threat of oil scarcity? The three articles under review address different aspects of a single problem: what they might do; what they have done; and whether they should believe that there is any scarcity. As befits students of international relations, the authors view this problem primarily as…
Roundtable 9-7 on Cyber War Versus Cyber Realities: Cyber Conflict in the International System
It is great pleasure to write an introduction to this roundtable on Cyber War Versus Cyber Realities by Brando Valeriano and Ryan Maness. This is an important book, one of the very few that addresses the new cyber age from a theoretical as well as an empirical perspective. The reviews are written by notable scholars…
Roundtable 9-6 on Narrative and the Making of US National Security
American Presidents are often maligned for their rhetoric. U.S. leaders’ words are not to be trusted: they will use whatever language allows them pander, to bluster, even to deceive their audiences. Yet as Ronald R. Krebs demonstrates in this impressive new work, presidential rhetoric is far from cheap. Indeed, it lies at the core of…
Policy Roundtable 1-3 on the International Atomic Energy Agency Statute at Sixty
Sixty years ago, on 23 October 1956, an international conference at the United Nations (UN) headquarters in New York adopted the Statute of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The document is almost as long as the UN Charter and remains the legal foundation of ‘the Agency,’ as the world nuclear organization is widely called.[1]…
Article Review 63 on “Deal or No Deal? The End of the Cold War and the U.S. Offer to Limit NATO Expansion.” International Security 40:4
The mills of historical research grind slowly,” Yale historian Hajo Holborn wrote in the early 1950s. Holborn made his observations with reference to the German delegation to Versailles in 1919. While it would have been “no doubt desirable” to the Germans to have “set into motion an objective study of the causes of the world…
Roundtable 9-5 on Peaceland: Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International Intervention
In Peaceland: Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International Intervention, Séverine Autesserre argues convincingly that a wide variety of international peacebuilders, however different they may seem at first glance, form a distinct cultural group who share everyday practices, narratives and habits. Moreover, she argues, these shared everyday elements are counter-productive and actually contribute to…
Article Review 62 on “Status Competition and Territorial Aggression: Evidence from the Scramble for Africa.” Security Studies 25:3
International relations scholars have long recognized the importance of status concerns in motivating state behavior.[1] However, surprisingly little work has disentangled status from its association with the distribution of power in the international system to identify clear conditions under which status dissatisfaction will be more or less salient. In this article, Joslyn Barnhart addresses both…
Roundtable 9-4 on The China Challenge: Shaping the Choices of a Rising Power
Few political scientists enjoy a level of respect within the discipline comparable to that of Thomas Christensen. His work is always theoretically informed, but also open to the insights of a variety of paradigms and approaches rather than being the captive of a single school of thought. Both of his previous books on alliance politics…
Article Review 61 on “Catalyzing Conflict: The Internal Dimension of the Security Dilemma.” Journal of Global Security Studies 1:2
Without saying so, Andrej Krickovic’s “Catalyzing Conflict” makes a compelling case that state power is a function of legitimacy. And legitimacy, in turn, is driven by a state’s ability to generate some combination of military capability (that, among other things, allows it to monopolize coercion within its borders), economic development, cultural unity, and political stability. …