International Relations

Scientific fields are shaped by many apparently contingent and capricious facts. This is one of the key insights of science and technology studies. And yet eventually it seems that scientific communities succeed in going beyond the limitations of these somewhat arbitrary starting points. The human sciences are especially vulnerable to this kind of arbitrariness, and facts about race, gender, and sexuality have been seen to have created arbitrary starting points in various fields of the social and human sciences. A case in point is the discipline of social psychology. Social psychology studies how individual human beings are shaped in their behavior by the social arrangements in which they mature and live. And yet all too often it has emerged that researchers in this discipline have brought with them a lot of baggage in the form of their own social assumptions which have distorted the theories and methods they have developed. Rob Sellers is an accomplished social psychologist at the Uni...

David Sanger's very interesting recent book, The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age , is a timely read this month, following the indictments of twelve Russian intelligence officers for hacking the DNC in 2015. Sanger is a national security writer for the New York Times , and has covered cyber security issues for a number of years. He and William Broad and John Markoff were among the first journalists to piece together the story behind the Stuxnet attack on Iran's nuclear fuel program (the secret program called Olympic Games), and the book also offers some intriguing hints about the possibility of "left of launch" intrusions by US agencies into the North Korean missile program. This is a book that everyone should read. It greatly broadens the scope of what most of us think about under the category of "hacking". We tend to think of invasions of privacy and identity theft when we think of nefarious uses of the internet; but Sanger makes it...

I've argued for the idea that social phenomena are generated by the actions, thoughts, and mental frameworks of myriad actors ( link ). This expresses the idea of ontological individualism. But I also believe that social arrangements -- structures, ideologies, institutions -- have genuine effects on the actions of individual actors and populations of actors and on intermediate-level social structures. There is real downward and lateral causation in the social world. Are these two views compatible? I believe they are compatible. The negative view holds that what appears to be downward causation is really just the workings of the lower-level components through their aggregation dynamics -- the lower struts of Coleman's boat ( link ). So when we say "the ideology of nationalism causes the rise of ultraconservative political leaders", this is just a shorthand for "many voters share the values of nationalism and elect candidates who propose radical solutions to issue...