India’s nuclear program has been a source of fascination for historians and political scientists for decades. Perhaps more than any other case, there are deep disagreements over what motivated India’s nuclear pursuits. For some, India’s nuclear program was driven in large part by domestic political concerns.[1] Others emphasize Indian leaders’ beliefs about national identity or…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Article Review 170: Fitzpatrick on Szalontai & Jinil, “Maneuvering between Baghdad and Tehran”
While cooperation between the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea) and Iran over the past three decades in developing ballistic missiles and possibly in sharing nuclear-weapons-related technology has been well studied,[1] very little attention has been given to Pyongyang’s relations with Baghdad.[2] South Korea-based scholars Balázs Szalontai and Yoo Jinil fill this…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Commentary II-5 on the Israel-Hamas War
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…