International Relations

Is it possible to elucidate complex social outcomes using computational tools? Can we overcome some of the issues for social explanation posed by the fact of heterogeneous actors and changing social environments by making use of increasingly powerful computational tools for modeling the social world? Ken Kollman, John Miller, and Scott Page make the affirmative case to this question in their 2003 volume, Computational Models in Political Economy . The book focuses on computational approaches to political economy and social choice. Their introduction provides an excellent overview of the methodological and philosophical issues that arise in computational social science. The subject of this book, political economy, naturally lends itself to a computational methodology. Much of political economy concerns institutions that aggregate the behavior of multiple actors, such as voters, politicians, organizations, consumers, and firms. Even when the interactions within and rules of a political o...

diagrams: Chernobyl reactor before and after Nuclear fission is one of the world-changing discoveries of the mid-twentieth century. The atomic bomb projects of the United States led to the atomic bombing of Japan in August 1945, and the hope for limitless electricity brought about the proliferation of a variety of nuclear reactors around the world in the decades following World War II. And, of course, nuclear weapons proliferated to other countries beyond the original circle of atomic powers. Given the enormous energies associated with fission and the dangerous and toxic properties of radioactive components of fission processes, the possibility of a nuclear accident is a particularly frightening one for the modern public. The world has seen the results of several massive nuclear accidents -- Chernobyl and Fukushima in particular -- and the devastating results they have had on human populations and the social and economic wellbeing of the regions in which they occurred. Safety is theref...

Paul Churchland made a large splash in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science several decades ago when he cast doubt on the categories of "folk psychology" -- the ordinary and commonsensical concepts we use to describe and understand each other's mental lives. In Paul Churchland and Patricia Churchland, On the Contrary: Critical Essays, 1987-1997 , Paul Churchland writes: "Folk psychology" denotes the prescientific, commonsense conceptual framework that all normally socialized humans deploy in order to comprehend, predict, explain, and manipulate the behavior of . humans and the higher animals. This framework includes concepts such as belief, desire, pain pleasure, love, hate, joy, fear, suspicion, memory, recognition, anger, sympathy, intention, and so forth.... Considered as a whole, it constitutes our conception of what a person is. (3) Churchland does not doubt that we ordinary human beings make use of these concepts in everyday life, and that we coul...

Odd Arne Westad's The Cold War: A World History  is a fascinating counterpoint to Tony Judt's Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 . There are some obvious differences -- notably, Westad takes a global approach to the Cold War, with substantial attention to the dynamics of Cold War competition in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, as well as Europe, whereas Judt's book is primarily focused on the politics and bi-polar competition of Communism and liberal democratic capitalism in Europe. Westad is a real expert on East Asia, so his global perspectives on the period are very well informed. Both books provide closely reasoned and authoritative interpretations of the large events of the 1950s through the 1990s. So it is very interesting to compare them from an historiographic point of view. The feature that I'd like to focus on here is Westad's perspective on these historical developments from the point of view of an international-relations conceptual ...