On 7 October 2023, Hamas attacked Israel in an unprecedented and unexpected manner. The attack, which included taking 240 hostages, killing more than 1,100 citizens, and engaging in “widespread sexual assaults against Israeli women” shocked the Israeli national psyche.[1] Israel responded with unprecedented force which (as of mid-April 2024) has led to more almost 38,000…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Policy Roundtable III-5 on US Economic Statecraft
In 2022, the Biden Administration enacted two major policies at the intersection of emerging technology and political economy. First, in August 2022, President Joe Biden signed the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) for America Fund, which allocated $52 billion in incentives and investments to re-shore semiconductor chip manufacturing from abroad. The legislative language…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 15-39 on Connelly, The Declassification Engine
Matthew Connelly’s The Declassification Engine: What History Reveals about America’s Top Secrets explores what it means for Americans to live in a society whose governing institutions are incentivized to keep secrets. The book stems from Connelly’s tenure as lead investigator at Columbia University’s History Lab, in which a team of historians and data scientists spent…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 15-38 on Lerner, From the Ashes of History
I am honored to provide this brief introduction to the roundtable discussion on Adam Lerner’s award-winning book.[1] As Lerner notes in his response, I endorsed it with a highly favourable blurb. I wrote: Through meticulous, powerful, and gripping case studies and a careful but also forceful set of theoretical assertions, Lerner’s ambitious book brilliantly demonstrates…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Review Essay 97: Matray on Pardo, South Korea’s Grand Strategy
Seventy years ago this past July an armistice agreement ended fighting in the Korean War. This brutal conflict left both the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) in the north and the Republic of Korea (ROK) in the south in ruins, especially North Korea, which experienced devastation as a consequence of massive US aerial bombardment….
H-Diplo|RJISSF Commentary II-4: “Henry Kissinger and the Angel of Applied History”
The news alerts declaring the death of former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger flashed across my iPhone in a feverish pitch matching my flu-induced fever. I felt utterly speechless—it did not seem real. Kissinger had most recently celebrated his centenary in May. The obituaries and the post-mortems similarly appeared in a feverish pace shortly…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Review Essay 95: Hymans on Potter, et al., Death Dust
The international security studies literature contains many thorough discussions of terrorists’ potential to acquire radiological “dirty bombs,” but it has mostly ignored the potential of states to do likewise.[1] Now, a crack team of nonproliferation experts led by the indefatigable William Potter has filled this gap in the literature with Death Dust, a fascinating comparative…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Article Review 169: Jakubec on Łukasiewicz, “A Shadow Party System”
A politico-legal institution and social condition, exile has roots in the two traditions molding Western civilization, the biblical and the classical. Yet, exile of political parties, i.e., of groups with a reasonably coherent political program and institutionalized internal organization, is a twentieth– century phenomenon. One may even dare to observe that it became undeniably palatable…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 15-37 on Spear, The Business of Armaments
Arms production and defense companies are back in the public spotlight. Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and rising geopolitical tensions have boosted governments’ demand for arms and prompted concerns for supply-chain and production capacity.[1] A recent analysis by The Financial Times found that, despite “swelling” backlogs, “the order books of the world’s biggest defence companies…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Article Review 168: Hunt on Ito and Rentetzi, The Co-Production of Nuclear Science and Diplomacy”
Kenji Ito and Maria Rentetzi make a clear and ambitious claim in the introduction to their special issue of History and Technology: “Knowledge production in science and technology is fundamentally diplomatic” (4). Their call to explore how nuclear science, technology, and engineering have been enacted through negotiations among states is of a piece with longstanding…