ROBERT JERVIS examines policy and politics in the United Kingdom and the United States. He offers a review and assessment of the recently published autobiography, A Journey: My Political Life by Tony Blair and Bob Woodward's Obama's Wars.
JUAN COLE analyzes political and economic developments in contemporary Pakistan and Afghanistan. He argues that Western preoccupation with "crisis" and "radicalism" in Pakistan has caused observers to miss the success of an expanding white-collar middle class in demanding a rule of law and a return to civilian rule after nearly a decade of military dictatorship. He questions the idea that there is a purely military, and especially Western military, solution to the problem of Talibanism in northwest Pakistan and southern Afghanistan, analyzing the insurgency as several distinct groups driven in part by religious nationalism and anti-imperialism.
DAVID M. KENNEDY revisits the New Deal's relevance to our own time. He concludes that the stubborn persistence of the Great Depression through the decade of the 1930s opened the political space for the New Deal's greatest accomplishments, all of which were aimed at reducing risk in key sectors of the economy and imparting a measure of security to American life for generations thereafter.
At his trial, the terrorist explained that he had bombed the crowded café because he harbored a “profound hatred, intensified every day by the revolting spectacle of society where all is base, all is cowardly.” He explained that women and children were legitimate targets because his enemies never spared civilian lives. Although he was surely headed for execution, the terrorist issued ominous warnings for civilization, predicting that his movement would never die. It was “everywhere, which makes it impossible to capture.” It would end only when justice was achieved—and when its enemies were dead. His fanaticism seems entirely typical of twenty-first century terrorism, which seems far more dangerous and threatening to society than any that has come before.
JOHN MUELLER suggests that we may be reaching a point at which war, as conventionally defined, ceases or nearly ceases to exist in both its international and civil varieties. He assesses the phenomenon and speculates about what this development, should it definitively materialize, might suggest about the various explanations and theories scholars and analysts have preferred to explain the problem of war.
Emily Jane Charnock, JAMES A. Mccann, and Kathryn Dunn Tenpas
Publication Date:
07-2009
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Political Science Quarterly
Institution:
Academy of Political Science
Abstract:
EMILY JANE CHARNOCK, JAMES A. McCANN, and KATHRYN DUNN TENPAS examine patterns of presidential travel since the Eisenhower years, focusing on the factors that prompt visits to particular states during the first term. The authors argue that electoral considerations are becoming increasingly relevant as presidents decide where and when to travel.