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The second installment of our live taping at the British International Studies Association annual...

Robert Cox's landmark article, "Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Rela...

Back in 2019, Uri Friedman wrote that we "find ourselves—as you will have heard in the corridors ...

It's our first "actual" installment of Whiskey & IR Theory in Space! We discuss Star Trek: Th...

Patrick and Dan talk about the newest feature of the podcast: a series in which they combine thei...

PTJ and Dan discuss Cynthia Weber's 1994 book, Simulating Sovereignty: Intervention, the State an...

"What is Theory?" published on by Oxford University Press.

There are different scientifically valid ways to produce knowledge. The field of International Relations should pay attention to these methodological differences, and to their implications for research on world politics. This book offers an introduction to the philosophy of science issues and their implications for the study of global politics.

The West Pole fallacy -- The language of legitimation -- The topography of postwar debates -- The power of "Western civilization" -- Conflicts of interpretation, 1944-46 -- The turning point, 1947-48 -- Securing the new trajectory, 1949-55 -- The fate of 'Western civilization'

One of my pet peeves when watching televised sports is when the commentators declare that one or another player or team "has momentum" or that "the momentum has shifted." Typically, this statement is made shortly after a team or player does something that puts them in a better position to win the game, and the implication seems to be that this change in momentum will carry someone to victory. But there are at least two problems with this all-too-typical sportscaster pronouncement. One is that "momentum" is a mathematically well-defined notion in physics, where it means the mass of an object multiplied by its velocity; linear momentum is also a vector quantity, and has both a magnitude and a direction. It is this complexity that allows momentum and changes in momentum—in conjunction with an account of the various forces at work on the object—to explain the object's trajectory. A well-kicked football has momentum in the physics sense, but it is quite unclear how the "momentum" of a player or a team might be calculated, to say nothing of the various forces at work on the player or team's movement through the playing of a game. Hence both the determination of a player or team's "momentum," and the use of that "momentum" in explaining or predicting the outcome of a game, necessarily remain at the level of metaphor.

William Bain's book does a brilliant job excavating some key conceptual underpinnings of our contemporary discussions about order, but he has perhaps underplayed the importance of nominalism in structuring our present.

C. A. W. Manning was an important figure in the early days of what became known as the English School, and was one of the most philosophically explicit articulators of the interpretivist approach that informed that branch of scholarship. He was also a defender of the apartheid system of his native South Africa. A close examination of his work reveals both the promises and the pitfalls of a methodologically interpretive approach to explanation. An interpretive explanation involves developing the capacity in the listener to "go on" appropriately, and this makes criticizing the rules of the game somewhat difficult, but not impossible. A clearer understanding of what an interpretive explanation is may very well help us to avoid the pitfalls illustrated by Manning's advocacy, which I argue is made possible by a category confusion that remains very much with us: a confusion between delineating the rules of a given domain, and actively advocating or defending those principles.