International Relations

The 1986 meltdown of reactor number 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant was the greatest nuclear disaster the world has yet seen. Less well known is the Kyshtym disaster in 1957, which resulted in a massive release of radioactive material in the Eastern Ural region of the Soviet Union. This was a catastrophic underground explosion at a nuclear storage facility near the Mayak power plant in the Eastern Ural region of the USSR. Information about the disaster was tightly restricted by Soviet authorities, with predictably bad consequences. Zhores Medvedev was one of the first qualified scientists to provide information and hypotheses about the Kyshtym disaster. His book Nuclear Disaster in the Urals was written while he was in exile in Great Britain and appeared in 1980. It is fascinating to learn that his reasoning is based on his study of ecological, biological, and environmental research done by Soviet scientists between 1957 and 1980. Medvedev was able to piece together the extent ...

Andrew Hopkins has written a number of fascinating case studies of industrial accidents, usually in the field of petrochemicals. These books are crucial reading for anyone interested in arriving at a better understanding of technological safety in the context of complex systems involving high-energy and tightly-coupled processes. Especially interesting is his Lessons from Longford: The ESSO Gas Plant Explosion . The Longford refining plant suffered an explosion and fire in 1998 that killed two workers, badly injured others, and interrupted the supply of natural gas to the state of Victoria for two weeks. Hopkins is a sociologist, but has developed substantial expertise in the technical details of petrochemical refining plants. He served as an expert witness in the Royal Commission hearings that investigated the accident. The accounts he offers of these disasters are genuinely fascinating to read. Hopkins makes the now-familiar point that companies often seek to lay responsibility for a...

One of the benefits of attending international conferences is meeting interesting scholars from different countries and traditions. I had that pleasure while participating in the Asian Conference on Philosophy of the Social Sciences at Nankai University in June, where I met Chaiyan Rajchagool. Chaiyan is a Thai academic in the social sciences. He earned his undergraduate degree in Thailand and received a PhD in sociology from the University of Manchester (UK). He has served as a senior academic administrator in Thailand and is now an associate professor of political science at the University of Phayao in northern Thailand. He is an experienced observer and analyst of Thai society, and he is one of dozens of Thai academics summoned by the military following the military coup in 2014 ( link ). I had numerous conversations with Chaiyan in Tianjin, which I enjoyed very much. He was generous to share with me his 1994 book,  The rise and fall of the Thai absolute monarchy: Foundations of...

The idea that there is a stark separation between many of our ideas of the social world, on the one hand, and the realities of the social world in which we live is an old one. We think "fairness and equality", but what we get is exploitation, domination, and opportunity-capture. And there is a reasonable suspicion that this gap is in some sense intentional: interested parties have deceived us. In some sense it was the lesson of Plato's allegory of the cave; it is the view that Marx expresses in his ideas of ideology and false consciousness; Gramsci's theory of hegemony expresses the view; Nietzsche seems to have this separation in mind in much of his writing; and the Frankfurt School made much of it as well. The antidote to these forms of illusion, according to many of these theorists, is  critique : careful, penetrating analysis and criticism of the presuppositions and claims of the ideological theory. (Here are several efforts within Understanding Society to engage...

I've just had the singular opportunity of participating in the habilitation examination of Gianluca Manzo at the Sorbonne, based on his excellent manuscript on the relevance of agent-based models for justifying causal claims in the social sciences. Manzo is currently a research fellow in sociology at CNRS in Paris ( Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique ), and is a prolific contributor to analytical sociology and computational social science. The habilitation essay is an excellent piece of work and I trust it will be published as an influential monograph. Manzo has the distinction of being expert both on the philosophical and theoretical debates that are underway about social causation and an active researcher in the field of ABM simulations. Pierre Demeulenaere served as a generous and sympathetic mentor. The committee consisted of Anouk Barberousse, Ivan Ermakoff, Andreas Flache, Olivier Godechot, and myself, and reviewer comments and observations were of the highest qua...