Barry Buzan and George Lawson have produced a book of grand scope that examines the multiple ways modernity has influenced the world and our theories about it. What they call the ‘global transformation’ brought about a shift from a polycentric world to a core-periphery order centered on the West. In the process, according to…
Roundtable 8-9 on Armed State Building: Confronting State Failure
In this important study, which should be of interest to both scholars and policymakers, Paul Miller examines the practice of armed state building by both the United States and the United Nations. While acknowledging that there are some characteristics of armed state building by liberal powers that are similar to the theory and practice of…
Article Review 48 on “The Making of a Non-Aligned Power: India’s Proliferation Drift 1964-8.”
In the aftermath of India’s five nuclear tests in May 1998, one analyst suggested that the motivations underlying its quest for nuclear weapons could be traced to ideas of national modernity and the lack of suitable scrutiny of a secretive scientific enclave. The same assessment argued that explanations that adduced material factors such as extant…
Roundtable 8-8 on Rivalry and Alliance Politics in Cold War Latin America
Transitions from rivalry to alliance within bilateral relationships have received considerable attention from historians of U.S. foreign relations. Or, more accurately, some alliances have received considerable attention; it remains unusual for works on inter-American relations to be cast principally as examinations of alliance politics. There are at least two interrelated reasons. First, the vast…
Article Review 47 on “Soldiers, Civilians, and Multilateral Humanitarian Intervention.”
Four years after the United States’ invasion of Iraq, former Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott wrote that one word summed up the U.S. failure in Iraq: “unilateralism.”[1] Scholars have largely agreed with this reading of international cooperation—or lack thereof—in the run-up to the war. As Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth note, such unanimity is…
Forum 12 on “Special Issue: Traditions of British International Thought”
Over the last twenty years, interest in past thinkers and theories has grown, and the history of international thought has emerged to stand alongside the history of political thought. A series of studies of canonical thinkers,[2] schools of thought,[3] and key periods have appeared,[4] advancing our knowledge of past international thought. At the same time,…
Welcome Frank Gavin
The H-Diplo/ISSF Editors are delighted to welcome Francis J. Gavin, Frank Stanton Chair in Nuclear Security Policy Studies at MIT, as managing editor of International Security Studies Forum (ISSF). Members of the larger H-Diplo community will, of course, be familiar with Frank and his distinguished work, as well as his ability to bridge the disciplines…
Roundtable 8-7 on Dictators at War and Peace
The International Security Studies Forum (ISSF) of H-Diplo is very pleased to provide a roundtable discussion of Dr. Jessica Weeks’s book, Dictators at War and Peace. The book offers an important answer to the centuries-old international relations question as to how the politics within states affect the politics between states? Since at least the Enlightenment,…
Roundtable 8-6 on Networks of Domination: The Social Foundations of Conquest
Voltaire famously observed that “God is always on the side of the big battalions” (5). International relations theorists and diplomatic historians have tended to find Voltaire’s explanation persuasive but, as Paul MacDonald shows in his provocative new book, peripheral conquest during the nineteenth century was a far more complicated endeavor than conventional warfare on the…
Article Review 46 on “Assessing the significance of women in combat roles.”
Discussions of gender in war have traditionally defaulted to the women-as-civilians/men-as-combatants dichotomy, but recent research has worked to debunk false and overly simplified assumptions about women and men in war.[1] Jessica Trisko Darden succinctly assesses the state of the field and highlights promising directions for future research on the significance of women in combat.