International Relations

Social Europe is a vibrant publisher of current progressive thought in Europe. Readers can find data, opinion, and policy analysis on the site, highly relevant to the core priorities of progressives across the continent and Britain -- social opportunity, inequalities, work, the threat of right-wing populism, the refugee crisis, and the future of the European Union. Here is the Twitter feed for Social Europe ( link ). SE also publishes a bi-annual journal called the Social Europe Journal . The most recent issue is focused on a recurring theme in Understanding Society , the menace posed by the rise of extreme-right populism. The volume is available as a digital book under the title, Understanding the Populist Revolt , edited by Henning Meyer. Several chapters of Understanding the Populist Revolt are particularly interesting, including Bo Rothstein's contribution, "Why has the white working class abandoned the left?". Rothstein's title poses a critical question, which...

I view transport as a crucial structuring condition in society that is perhaps under-appreciated and under-studied. The extension of the Red Line from Harvard Square (its terminus when I was a graduate student) to Davis Square in Somerville a decade later illustrated the transformative power of a change in the availability of urban transportation; residential patterns, the creation of new businesses, and the transformation of the housing market all shifted rapidly once it was possible to get from Davis Square to downtown Boston for a few dollars and 30 minutes. The creation of networks of super-high-speed trains in Europe and Asia does the same for the context of continental-scale economic and cultural impacts. And the advent of container shipping in the 1950's permitted a substantial surge in the globalization of the economy by reducing the cost of delivery of products from producer to consumer. Containers were a disruptive technology. It is clear that transportation systems are a...

It is apparent, on this first round of the presidential elections in France, that we urgently need to understand better the dynamics and causes of radical populism in democratic polities. What is populism? Why does it have such virulence in the current moment as a political movement? What roles do racism, xenophobia, resentment, and economic fear play in the readiness of ordinary citizens in Europe and America to support radical populist candidates and platforms? The topic has been the subject of research by very talented investigators over the past twenty years. Several recent books are especially relevant in the current moment. Particularly relevant are Cas Mudde and Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser's Populism: A Very Short Introduction ; Jan-Werner Muller's What Is Populism? ; and a recent collection by Social Europe edited by Henning Meyer, Understanding the Populist Revolt . Taken together, the three sources provide an excellent basis for thinking further about the nature of ra...

One of the more intriguing currents of social science research today is the field of complexity theory. Scientists like John Holland ( Complexity: A Very Short Introduction ), John Miller and Scott Page ( Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life ), and Joshua Epstein ( Generative Social Science: Studies in Agent-Based Computational Modeling ) make bold and interesting claims about how social processes embody the intricate interconnectedness of complex systems. John Holland describes some of the features of behavior of complex systems in these terms in Complexity : self-organization into patterns, as occurs with flocks of birds or schools of fish   chaotic behaviour where small changes in initial conditions (� the flapping of a butterfly�s wings in Argentina�) produce large later changes (� a hurricane in the Caribbean�)   �fat-tailed� behaviour, where rare events (e.g. mass extinctions and market crashes) occur much more often ...

An earlier post reiterated my reasons for doubting that the social sciences can in principle give rise to general theories that serve to organize and predict the domain of social phenomena. The causes of social events are too heterogeneous and conjunctural to permit this kind of systematic representation. That said, social behavior and social processes give rise to very interesting patterns at the macro scale. And it is always legitimate to ask what the causes are that produce these patterns. Consider the following graphs. They are drawn very miscellaneously from a range of social science disciplines. These graphs represent many different kinds of social behavior and processes. A few are synchronic -- snapshots of a variable at a moment in time. The graph of India's population age structure falls in this category, as do the graphs of India's literacy rates. Most are diachronic, representing change over time. The majority show an apparent pattern of stochastic change, even in ca...