How Do We Know an Intervention Has Succeeded?

We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation. . . . We’re monitoring that situation very carefully. We have put together a range of contingency plans. – President Obama Back in late August of 2012, President Obama uttered words these in an impromptu press conference. At the time, it represented the most concrete and coherent statement of policy regarding the conflict in Syria. With the latest revelation that the Assad regime used chemical weapons on a small scale, calls …

Syriana: Responsibility to Protect or Someone Else’s Problem?

If you’ve ever taken an International Relations Theory course then it’s likely that you’ve encountered the ubiquitous naysayer or two of IR Theory. “Why does this even matter in the study of foreign policy?” “Who cares what the Athenians told the Melians (FYI: 'The strong do as they can and the weak suffer what they must')?” “Leaders don’t think about this stuff when formulating foreign policy!” Now, the last accusation may in fact be true. Sure, foreign policy elites are not necessarily thumbing through volumes of Morgenthau, Grotius, Kant, Wendt, and/or Waltz when deciding what to do about North Korea. But, these authors and the IR theories they construct provide useful …

Desperate Characters: Best of 2012 Part II

As part of ToM's Best of 2012 our contributors reflect on books, movies, music, and other pop culture stand-by's that they discovered this year, no matter when their source of inspiration originated.  That's right, it's a vaguely "objet trouvé" Best of 2012.   Art historians everywhere are recoiling. ToM's Adam Gallagher serves up our second installment.  Click here for part I. Anyone that even pays a minuscule amount of attention to current events should be given a free pass to a certain type of quiet resignation. Here are a few salient reasons why: Climate change, gun violence killing children in American schools, drone strikes killing children abroad, abject poverty, and …

Contesting Citizenship

The rise of indigenous movements in Latin American in the latter third of the 20th century has marked a significantly striking historical phenomenon. While the indigenous people of Latin America have organized to redress grievances in the past, they have rarely done so as part of an expressly Indian or ethnic enterprise. Indeed, Latin America has largely been viewed as an anomaly in the cultural pluralist literature because of the relative paucity of ethnic-based mobilization. However, this former perspective is no longer tenable in light of the manifold indigenous movements - many of which have achieved important successes - that have been operating within Latin American politics. In …

The Justice Cascade

Author’s Note: I wrote this piece about a week before Liberian strongman Charles Taylor was found guilty Thursday of aiding and abetting grave human rights abuses and war crimes in a historic verdict by the Special Court for Sierra Leone. Taylor’s conviction both reinforces the arguments offered by Sikkink (that are discussed below) and my criticisms of her argument. While Taylor’s conviction is important, it is indeed incredibly rare for a  head of state to be convicted in an international court, it also demonstrates the limited diffusion of the justice norm. No one can argue that bringing African human rights violators like Taylor, Omar al-Bashir, or even the now infamous Joseph …

The Allure of Labor

Over the course of the last four decades, workers have undoubtedly been one of the chief casualities of neoliberal economics. The recent conspicuous battles waged by unions against Republican governors in Wisconsin and Ohio are but a microcosm of efforts implemented by both the state and capital to weaken workers’ ability to unionize, bargain collectively, and generally organize to redress their grievances. In the United States, labor has rarely been able to rely on the state to serve an as unbiased meditator and this has only worsened with the hegemony of neoliberal orthodoxy. However, the state-capital-labor nexus has had numerous historical iterations. In the conservative-corporatist …

Whither the US Welfare Regime?

In the throes of the second greatest economic crisis in the country’s history, the U.S. welfare regime is under systematic attack from those purportedly aiming to put the United States’ fiscal house in order. As poverty rates and unemployment rise and the country’s infrastructure and education system are slowly decaying, the limited social safety nets the United States provides—particularly compared with its peers in Western Europe—are being dismantled at an ever quickening, seemingly quotidian, pace. Political leaders from both parties frequently pillory anyone who calls for expanding welfare benefits and propose privatization or draconian reforms of entitlement programs that keep …

Our Path-Dependent Future: What Happens When Change and Habit Collide?

In 2007 and 2008, then Senator Barack Obama ran on a campaign slogan: “Change you can believe in.” Obama’s campaign asserted that his election would rectify the metastasizing wealth gap between the rich and the poor, address the high unemployment rate, and restore America to the “shining city on a hill” that it once was. While one can debate whether or not Obama used cynical sloganeering or if he earnestly intended to implement such change, the study of change in political science could have served President Obama well. Within the political science discipline there are several schools of thought regarding institutional change. Mahoney and Thelen and the broader rational choice …

The Great Capitalist/Christian Resonance Machine

Capitalism, particularly over the past three decades, has become a “god” of American society, politics, economics and culture. When capitalism experiences crises (and it does experience many) it is not the system itself that is called into question, but intrusive government, regulators and other violators of the purported self-equilibrating “invisible hand of the market.” Furthering the deification of capitalism is its ties to Christianity. These ties have been examined, perhaps most famously and trenchantly by Max Weber, but the two have become intertwined and imbricated in new and destructive ways in our neoliberal era. According to William Connolly, it is this assemblage of …

Neoliberalism’s License to Ill

“Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today.” With this remark, historian Tony Judt begins his polemical jeremiad Ill Fares the Land. The book is at once a sustained lamentation for the seemingly moribund ideals of social democracy and a clarion call to conserve the successes of the progressive initiatives of the West in the aftermath of the World War II. Judt, who passed away in August of 2010, dictated this book while suffering from ALS (commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease); a disease that eventually rendered him immobile. Judt was proudly a man of the Left, yet his encomium for social democracy is infused with a certain British conservatism. He wishes to preserve …