Paul C. Avey has done international security scholars a tremendous service with his research on the role played by nuclear non-use norms in military confrontations. In “Who’s Afraid of the Bomb?,” Avery takes on a key question that has seen surprisingly little attention to date: to what extent do non-nuclear states disregard the credibility of…
Roundtable 8-17 on The Dictator’s Army: Effectiveness in Authoritarian Regimes
Scholars of political violence readily delve into policy and strategy but seldom below those levels of analysis. They usually consign concern with operations and tactics to military buffs. As Carl von Clausewitz argued, however, strategic success depends on and is ultimately reducible to tactical success.[1] So predicting how military success or failure affect political and…
Roundtable 8-16 on Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy
There are many international relations theorists in academia who opine on world order and grand strategy. There are many policy analysts in think tanks with deep understanding of military programs, budgets, and operations. There are not many, however, who combine both sorts of expertise in equal depth. Barry Posen is one of the very best…
Forum 14 on “Obama’s World: Judging His Foreign Policy Record”
Foreign Affairs recently featured a forum on “Obama’s World: Judging His Foreign Policy Record.” Gideon Rose, editor of the journal, started the discussion with an overall positive assessment of President Barack Obama’s foreign policy through August 1, 2015 and the agreement with Iran on its nuclear program.[1] The Islamic State (ISSIL) seized Mosul, the second…
Article Review 56 on “Hard Thinking about Hard and Easy Cases in Security Studies.” Security Studies 24:3 (July-September 2015)
American political scientists who perform case studies straddle two very different strategies of inquiry. On the one hand, they seek to understand politics in terms of narratives that explore closely the events in a single historical episode. On the other, they work within a disciplinary framework that emphasizes the statement of general theories, the treatment…
Roundtable 8-15 on A Sense of Power: The Roots of America’s Global Role
John Thompson has been thinking deeply about American politics and foreign policy for almost fifty years. Previously, he has written luminously about the Progressive era and Woodrow Wilson. Now, he has integrated the conclusions of several important articles that he has written over the years and congealed his thinking about the motivations undergirding America’s assumption…
Roundtable 8-14 on Democracy Promotion, National Security and Strategy: Foreign Policy under the Reagan Administration
In Democracy Promotion, National Security and Strategy: Foreign Policy under the Reagan Administration, Robert Pee explores the United States’ attempts to promote democracy abroad during the Reagan administration. The title of Pee’s book captures a central challenge Washington faced with this issue not only during the 1980s but also throughout the Cold War after 1945….
Article Review 55 on “Process Tracing: A Symposium.” Security Studies 24:2
For scholars engaging in qualitative analysis, the concept of ‘process tracing’ comes in many shapes and forms. In its most basic form, process tracing refers to a set of procedures that uses qualitative evidence in an attempt to establish a causal relationship between one or more explanatory variables and a dependent variable. Notwithstanding the common…
Article Review 54 on “Analytic Outreach for Intelligence: Insights from a Workshop on Emerging Biotechnology Threats.”
What are preferred ways for members of the academic community to undertake analytic outreach with their counterparts in the intelligence community on important issues, such as emerging biotechnology threats? What are the impediments and opportunities most likely to shape a productive engagement between academic scholars and intelligence analysts on the topics of assessing biotechnology trends…
Review Essay 29 on The Bomb: South Africa’s Nuclear Program
Nic von Wielligh’s new book on the history of the South African nuclear project is a timely contribution to the on-going scholarly debate on why and how countries choose to develop, maintain and dismantle nuclear weapons programs. Since South Africa is the only country to date that has undergone a voluntary complete nuclear roll-back, its…