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Theory as thought

Recently a friend and colleague wrote me to say:   “The SS piece is actually really useful to me as a model for dealing with Political Science post paradigm wars.”   Which prompts me (as if academics...

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Understanding Zombie Comedy

Earlier this week, Tufts professor Dan Drezner tweeted that his Theory of International Politics and Zombies book has now sold more than 10,000 copies. That’s a huge total by academic standards and I...

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Clashing Networks and Foreign Policy

Anne Marie Slaughter and Dan Drezner had an interesting debate last week on the role of nonstate actors in foreign policy. AMS stakes out a “modern/liberal-social” position highlighting the role of...

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Hu’s Culture War

Building on PM’s earlier post, “Cultural Weapons and International Relations” I’d like to look at an example that helps to illustrate the ways in which Realism misunderstands the role of culture in...

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Retrenchment & Liberal Internationalism don’t really Fit Together (2): R2P

: Here is part one, where I argued that international relations as a field has become increasingly uncomfortable with the America’s post-Cold War hegemony and the level of force used in the GWoT, but…...

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In Defense of Particularism in American Foreign policy

[This is a cross-posting from Dart-Throwing Chimp.] I’ve just finished reading John Lewis Gaddis’s terrific biography of George Frost Kennan, a towering figure in American foreign policy after World...

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Why don’t Korea and Japan Align, even though IR says they should?

For awhile I was collecting links and such to make an argument about Korea and Japan working together on big issues like China and NK, or finally clinching the much-discussed but little worked-on FTA....

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Mirror, Mirror upon the Wall — Who is the Realist of them All?

Despite Adam Elkus’s prodding, I avoided participating in the first-round beat down of Paul J. Saunders supremely stupid essay, “Giving Realists a Bad Name.” That’s okay, because Daniel Larison, Dan...

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Being realistic about (academic) realism

At the BISA/ISA panel on pluralism Jennifer Sterling-Folker stressed that realism is not the “dominant paradigm” of North American international-relations scholarship. Instead, she argued, neoliberal...

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Russia and Syria

Dan Drezner asks “Dear realists: please explain Russia“: I raise all of this because a few days ago Charles Clover in the Financial Times wrote an interesting story about Russia’s foreign policy in...

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R2P and the “Double-Standard Problem”

Jean-Baptiste Jeangène Vilmer (writing at the Fair Observer) argues that there’s no double-standard problem because the Libyan intervention did not establish or reflect a generalized responsibility to...

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Podcast No. 18: Interview with Stefano Guzzini

The eighteenth Duck of Minerva podcast features Stefano Guzzini of the Danish Institute for International Studies and Uppsala University . Professor Guzzini discusses, among other things his...

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The New Grand-Strategic Divide? A Response to Thomas Wright

The style of this piece deviates from what I usually put up here. By way of explanation: I wrote this after some initial indications of interest by Foreign Policy in running a response. But they’ve got...

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Sorry General, War is a Choice

General David Petraeus advises Americans and their allies to be coldly realistic about what force can achieve. Oddly, he also advises them to prepare for a future where small wars are pretty much...

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More on Moral Hazard in US Alliances: Explaining Japan-Korea Tension (and...

So this post is a bleg to those of you who know more about alliances than me. I am considering writing this up for an article, so I thought I would ‘crowd-source’ early comments on the basic argument....

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Crimea is not a Realist story

[Note:  This is a guest post by Jarrod Hayes, assistant professor of international relations at the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology.  His first book,...

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John Vasquez, Territoriality, and Staying Ahead of the Game

by Brandon Valeriano and Andy Owsiak What follows is a dialog between us on John Vasquez’s contributions to the field of IR based on a recent roundtable honoring his work at the Annual Meeting of the...

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Random Thought

Modern realist theory contains no arguments (of significance) absent in the writings of Niccolò Machiavelli or Francisco Guicciardini. Share

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A Different Take on the “Obama Doctrine”: Is Obama still a realist?

So President Obama has his own doctrine now, because Wolf Blitzer tells us so. It is basically what Ross Douhat of the New York Times called the “liberal way of war” in a column on March 20. Libya is...

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Terrorism: A Problem for Realists

Whatever version of political realism you are dealing with, the sovereign state is still central to its universe. Which is one reason realists are uncomfortable with any world view that accords...

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