It is a great pleasure and privilege to provide this brief introduction to the roundtable review of Monica Duffy Toft and Sidita Kushi’s Dying by The Sword: The Militarization of US Foreign Policy. The book tackles one of the fundamental questions that the scholars at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London put…
Tag: military intervention
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 15-5 on Ghalehdar, The Origins of Overthrow
In his fascinating new book, The Origins of Overthrow: How Emotional Frustration Shapes US Regime Change Interventions, Payam Ghalehdar discusses a private letter President Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Henry White, who was the American Ambassador in Rome. The letter was posted two weeks before Roosevelt sent 2,000 United States Marines to establish a new provisional…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 29 on Powell, France’s Wars in Chad
On 27 February 2023, French President Emmanuel Macron delivered a speech on the future of Franco-African relations. The proposed changes represented a fundamental reorientation of French activity on the continent, and would represent a major departure from French policy over the past 70 years. Among other changes, Macron pledged to drastically reduce France’s military presence,…
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…
Article Review 112 on “Divided Priorities: Why and When Allies Differ Over Military Intervention.”
“Divided priorities: why and when allies differ over military intervention” by Ronald R. Krebs and Jennifer Spindel is an important piece of research. The authors challenge the validity of the claim that weaker allies value their patrons’ hawkish postures in distant conflicts. This claim, first put forward by Glen Snyder in Deterrence and Defense (1961),…
Roundtable 7-12 on Just and Unjust Military Intervention: European Thinkers from Vitoria to Mill
Just and Unjust Military Intervention is a superb collection of essays by leading scholars examining the continuing relevance of the political thought of classical thinkers such as John Locke, Immanuel Kant, Edmund Burke, and John Stuart Mill among others. Stefano Recchia and Jennifer Welsh, the editors of the volume, are quite conscious of the central…