International Relations

What kind of political movement does Donald Trump represent? How did we get here? And what will be needed to defeat this divisive and anti-democratic political agenda? There is a tendency to see Trump as a bolt out of the blue, an anomaly -- an extraordinary showman who somehow conned just enough voters to gain him the Republican nomination and then to prevail as a minority vote getter with an electoral college majority. But now that we've had a few months to reflect on the election, it seems a little more clear that Trump represents something different and even more worrisome. His presidency is more like an American version of a global phenomenon -- a populist ultra-rightist who has come to power on the strength of a political program of xenophobia, hatred of immigrants, and racism. The extreme right has made sizable gains in Europe in the past forty years. Pippa Norris provides a summary statistic on the rise of the radical right in Western Europe: source: Pippa Norris,  The Rise...

Earlier posts have addressed the issue of the rise of extreme-right parties and ideologies in many parts of the world, including Western Europe and the United States. A valuable multi-country research project now seeks to shed light on these phenomena based on large-scale surveys of attitudes among young people. MYPLACE (Memory, Youth, Public Legacy and Civic Engagement) is a multi-country data set in order to assess the distribution and variation of extreme right ideologies across countries and social groups ( link ). This research project provides substantial survey data about the civic and political attitudes of young people in numerous European countries. Here is a brief description of the research project on the MYPLACE website: MYPLACE can provide a hugely rich and sophisticated dataset, covering young people�s attitudes and beliefs in relation, specifically, to far-right and populist ideologies, but in practice covering issues such as class, xenophobia, racism, education and tru...

In the past few years many observers have been alarmed by the high-tech realities of cyber-security, cyber-spying, and cyber-warfare. The current interest is on the apparent impunity with which government-sponsored intruders have managed to penetrate and exploit the computer systems of government and corporate organizations -- often extracting vast quantities of sensitive or classified information over extended periods of time. The Sony intrusion and the Office of Personnel Management intrusion represent clear examples of each ( link , link ). Gildart Jackson's Cyberspies: The Secret History of Surveillance, Hacking, and Digital Espionage provides a very interesting description of the contemporary realities of cyber-spying by governments and private intruders. It is very interesting to realize that the cat-and-mouse game of using cryptography, electronic signals collection, and intelligence analysis to read an adversary's intentions and communications has a long history, and r...

The topic of the historicity of academic disciplines has come up numerous times in this forum. It is a conviction of mine that disciplines demonstrate a great deal of path dependency over time in their evolution. We can think of a discipline as being constituted at a time by some or all of these elements: a definition of important questions for research a definition of appropriate methods of research and analysis a model of explanation in the field some key examples of what theories and hypotheses ought to look like institutions for supporting, organizing, and directing research efforts institutions for validating and disseminating research findings institutions for training young researchers in the key elements of the discipline This sounds a lot like Kuhn's idea of a paradigm, Lakatos's idea of a research community, or the definitions of scientific enterprise offered by historians and sociologists of science and researchers in the tradition of STS studies ( link ). An academi...

images: Rahman as keynote speaker at "Black Men in Unions" Institute, UM-Dearborn, 2012;  Rahman with Huey Newton at Detroit Metro Airport, 1970 In an earlier post I discussed the path through which an African-American intellectual, Phil Richards, came to have the intellectual profile he has today. Here I will reflect upon the development of another African-American man, born in the same year, who also journeyed from the inner city to a career as an academic, but through a very different route. Ahmad Rahman traveled through life from childhood in Chicago in the 1950s to becoming a Black Panther in Detroit in his teens to becoming a professor of history in adulthood. Rahman presents an interesting contrast with Richards. Ahmad Rahman too was a powerful personality and an intelligent man whose life itinerary and character were shaped by the experience of race and racism in urban America. Ahmad too became a member of the Black intelligentsia. But his itinerary was dramatically d...

Becoming an intellectual in any society is a chancy thing, and this is especially true for young people coming from backgrounds of disadvantage and discrimination. What were the influences that gave the child and young adult the curiosity and other intellectual qualities that led him or her to seek out new knowledge and new questions throughout high school and college? What factors helped to produce some of the  specific  qualities of mind that became the  particular  inquiring intellect of the adult? How did Orwell become Orwell, or W.E.B. DuBois become DuBois? Several recent autobiographies are worth reading for anyone interested in knowing more about what it's like to develop as a black man in America into a serious intellectual in adulthood. One is by Phillip Richards, an emeritus professor of English at Colgate University. His autobiography  An Integrated Boyhood: Coming of Age in White Cleveland  is a powerful account of one man's journey from inner...