Published on January 31, 2025 4:23 PM GMT
A friend of mine recently recommended that I read through articles from the journal International Security, in order to learn more about international relations, national security, and political science. I've really enjoyed it so far, and I think it's helped me have a clearer picture of how IR academics think about stuff, especially the core power dynamics that they think shape international relations.
Here are a few of the articles I most enjoyed.
"Not So Innocent" argues that ethnoreligious cleansing of Jews and Muslims from Western Europe in the 11th-16th century was mostly driven by the Catholic Church trying to consolidate its power at the expense of local kingdoms. Religious minorities usually sided with local monarchs against the Church (because they definitionally didn't respect the church's authority, e.g. they didn't care if the Church excommunicated the king). So when the Church was powerful, it was incentivized to pressure kings to destroy those minority groups. The article notes that e.g. Jews were less persecuted in states that were directly ruled by the Pope than by states not ruled by the Pope. I liked this article because it explored power dynamics that were obvious in hindsight but that I hadn't thought of before. For example, I somehow hadn't realized that a core motivation for the church to persecute heritics and infidels is that it was straightforwardly motivated to do so.
Another reason I liked this article is that I find the core power dynamics counterintuitive in a way that lets me look at them with fresh eyes. As a result of my religious upbringing and slightly traumatic deconversion, it's hard for me to read "and then the Pope threatened to excommunicate him" without some part of me shouting "OK BUT THAT'S FAKE". But in fact, lots of stuff that states do is "kind of fake"--a king doesn't have magical powers, he just has a bunch of expectations around him that allow him to set up coordination games that make him powerful. But for some reason, I intuitively believe in the reality of states in a way that I don't believe in the reality of religion. So it's very helpful to read about power dynamics in a context where I automatically shake myself out of thinking that power is ontologically basic, and instead think of it as the more complicated emergent phenomenon that it is.
It also contains the following passage that I thought was startlingly and amusingly decoupling:
Victimization of civilians, especially by their own governments, is a puzzle because it is today considered both “morally wrong” and “bad strategy,” even during wartime.123 The state loses significant material resources, people, and revenue when large numbers of civilians are killed or deported. Yet the mass victimization of all non-Christian minorities became the norm across medieval Western Europe. Though democracies may have a path “from voting to violence,” whereby political parties exploit ethnoreligious rivalries and anti-minority popular opinion,124 monarchies in medieval Europe did not have to follow popular opinion. That a monarchy would destroy an important portion of the country's population and revenue base is even more puzzling, since monarchs derived economic and military benefits from having Jews and Muslims as their property.
When I read history, I often find that I fail to predict what happens next because some part of me shies away from coming up with ideas that feel too heinously evil. The first time I remember having a strong experience of this was when I read about the Warsaw Uprising. In 1944, as the Soviet army approached Warsaw, Polish resistance forces staged an uprising against the Nazi occupiers. I totally failed to predict what happened next: the Soviets waited outside the city until the Nazis eventually regrouped and destroyed the resistance and destroyed Warsaw in retaliation. They did this because Stalin thought it would be easier to subjugate Poland if there were fewer people around who would be well placed to lead resistance efforts against him, and letting the resistance be destroyed by the Nazis was an easy way to further this goal. For some reason, even in the context of WW2, I found that truly horrifying when I first learned it.
“Back to Bipolarity” argues that the current international order is best characterized as bipolar (with the US and China as the great powers) rather than unipolar; I infer that there’s a lot of contention about this among IR scholars. In order to do this, it takes a list of historical eras where scholars agree on who the great powers were:
Great Powers and Leading States, 1820–1990
| System | Great powers | Leading state |
| 1820–1850 | Austria, France, Prussia, Russia, United Kingdom | United Kingdom |
| 1860–1890 | Austria, France, Italy, Prussia, Russia, United Kingdom | United Kingdom |
| 1900–1940 | Austria (to 1918), France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia/Soviet Union, United Kingdom, United States | United States |
| 1950–1990 | China, France, Germany, Soviet Union, United Kingdom, United States | United States |
And it then considers different metrics that you might have hoped to use to rate the power of a state. It notes that military expenditure, number of military personnel, GDP, and GDP * GDP/capita all work reasonably well to predict whether historians rate the state as great power. Then it notes that by these same metrics, China is more powerful than typical non-leading great powers, and argues that we should consider the current world bipolar. It also notes:
As noted, scholars routinely characterize the Cold War as a bipolar system with two superpowers: the Soviet Union and the United States. Today, China exceeds the Soviet Union on almost every dimension of national power. China has vastly stronger economic capabilities than the Soviet Union ever did. China lags the Soviets only for military expenditure, but, importantly, China spends an estimated 1.7–2 percent of its GDP on defense (relative to the Soviet Union, which spent a punishing 12–14 percent).
I can’t really summarize ”The Myth of a Bipartisan Golden Age for U.S. Foreign Policy” better than slightly editing its abstract:
Scholars and practitioners of U.S. foreign policy commonly describe the early Cold War as a lost golden age of bipartisan consensus. This article uses public opinion data, congressional voting patterns, and party platform statements to refute this conventional wisdom. In fact, the core internationalist principles that enjoyed bipartisan agreement during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations [1945-61] retain widespread approval from Democrats and Republicans today.
Enduring support for this Truman-Eisenhower consensus is concealed by the way that recent presidents have enlarged the United States’ foreign policy agenda to pursue policies that historically did not generate bipartisanship, such as fighting climate change or conducting decades-long projects in armed nation-building. Rising political divisions in U.S. foreign policy are thus primarily a result of Democrats and Republicans deploying global influence in new ways rather than renouncing traditional international commitments. These findings refute widespread claims that political polarization has undermined traditional conceptions of U.S. global leadership or depleted Washington's usable power.
Overall, I really enjoyed reading these and other articles, which I found through some mix of browsing recent issues and looking at the “most read” and “most cited” lists. I found them amusingly similar to LessWrong posts in a bunch of ways: essays written by well-informed people who have neat ideas for how to do empirical studies in order to shed light on arguments of mutual interest. This journal was way easier to read than many of the academic journals I’ve tried to read articles from over the years.
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