Modern Iran represents one of the biggest waiting games of the world today. A beautiful, civilised, and hospitable country containing one of the nicer peoples on earth, and with a distinguished history to boast, has become one of the world’s most rejected nations ruled by those with standards and practices more suitable to the middle ages than the 21st Century.
From afar, the protests in Arab countries seem broadly similar: economic factors – such as the global recession’s impact on migrant remittances, as well as rising food prices – are being cited as the impetus for the revolts. Yet while economic grievances are not irrelevant, the structural meta-narrative, just like the cultural one, is problematic.
Last week, in his regular religion column for the Louisville Courier Journal, journalist Peter Smith discussed the results of a recent survey about climate change. As per usual in the U.S. context, the survey asked whether particular people believed in global warming — as if the science on this question was not largely settled.
Strategic theory offers an exact and coherent basis for investigating social phenomena. It is able to de-conflict the attempt to assess social activity designed to achieve goals from arbitrary moral valuations. It facilitates clarity of understanding, and is thereby, mind opening and intellectually liberating.
I started writing this blog in an angry retort to the bombastic voice of Peter King but what I have ended up with is more confusion than insight. The Chair of the Homeland Security Committee, Peter King has previously made a number of comments towards Islam and Muslims that have […]
From the social uprising that toppled Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s regime in Tunisia on January 11, 2011, to the recent social unrest in Libya to oust the 40 year old reign of Muammar Gadhafi, many political scientists have been left puzzled as to reasons behind the North African revolutionary movement and where it could spread in the coming weeks.
This is a hectic season for IR junkies – another American-led war, several new African catastrophes, another crisis over the Euro, and (perhaps, best of all) the return of the nuclear issue. As these have arisen I’ve been wondering what kind of a creature IR is in the aftermath of […]
IR – SO, WHO IS IT FOR? It is often said that the study of International Relations is either for the world’s people or for national politics. This cliché usefully explains the chasm between Harvey Sapolsky and myself. And anyone reading his Blogs and my own will recognise that we […]
Professor Peter Vale’s provocative piece on “The Responsibility of IR Scholars” deserves comment which I suspect many e-IR readers will provide. Let me offer mine in this blog. I must say that I would hardly claim to be an IR Scholar as I was trained in political economy and government […]
Those eager to advise the prince often take the logic of Realist IR into dark places where fateful decisions are made. Why are so few voices in IR raised in dissent? And what must/should happen to those who carried the craft towards those fateful moments? And, most importantly, what’s to be done?
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