If you ever worry that America is being run by a bumbling mass of venal nincompoops, or fret that American society is slouching toward self-destruction, Andrew Bacevich’s collected essays will provide ample fodder for your fears. On Shedding an Obsolete Past: Bidding Farewell to the American Century is not a work of scholarship, but rather…
Tag: intervention
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 15-47 on Mukhopadhyay and Howe, Good Rebel Governance
In their book, Good Rebel Governance: Revolutionary Politics and Western Intervention in Syria, Dipali Mukhopadhyay and Kimberly Howe consider variation in the practice of “counter-state” governance in Syria between 2014 and 2016, particularly emphasizing that it is imperative for would-be and actual governors to maintain a closeness with their constituents in order to be seen…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Review Essay 98 on Mirski, We May Dominate the World
US Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler is one of many colorful characters to make a cameo in Sean Mirski’s We May Dominate the World: Ambition, Anxiety, and the Rise of the American Colossus. Butler is the “Where’s Waldo” of the historical record of early twentieth century US interventions. He first pops up in Cuba…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable on Kisangani & Pickering African Interventions
Emizet F. Kisangani and Jeffrey Pickering have written a groundbreaking analysis of African international relations. As a historian of international history, with a particular interest in Africa, who also teaches courses on International Relations Theory (IR) I can only applaud its appearance. Increasingly my colleagues, who combine international history and IR theory, and I are…
Roundtable 9-15 on The Statebuilder’s Dilemma: On the Limits of Foreign Intervention
It is hard to recapture the confidence, indeed the hubris, which emerged in certain policy circles in 2002 and early 2003, after the United States successfully brought down the Taliban government in Afghanistan and was primed to overrun Iraq. It was not simply neoconservative officials from the George W. Bush administration possessed by delusional visions….
Article Review 24 on “When Duty Calls: A Pragmatic Standard of Humanitarian Intervention.”
Robert Pape adds to a growing literature that is trying to develop a more cohesive approach to controlling or mitigating episodes of genocide and mass atrocity violence. His call for a more pragmatic approach is certainly laudable and his claims that the world has not fared well in preventing past genocides is certainly correct. Overall,…