Journal of International Studies

What Are The Advantages of Comparing Institutions and Political Processes In Two Or More Countries Compared To the Study Of the Same Institutions Or Processes In a Single Country?

While “This Town” insiders ponder winners and losers and revert to “kicking the can down the road” clichés, deeper currents are operating. Those currents are less about federal budgets and public finance, debt ceilings and sequestration, and much more about the condition of America’s democracy and its social divisions. Political parties reflect shifting social tides and often alter their structures, methods and appeals to seek advantage in those shifting tides. Political power shifts from party to party, but leads to one-party dominance only when times are difficult—the great depression—or when times are relatively calm—the Eisenhower years. Even then, there is often a minority hedge against one-party dominance reflecting Acton’s axiom regarding power corrupting. We will have unstable government, exhibited in quarterly budget battles, until the Republican Party resolves its struggle between traditionalists and tea-party insurgents. So long as traditional Republicans operate in...

When I was commissioned a Marine Corps officer in 1998, I was told to believe non-state entities were dangerous to U.S. national security.  Whether forecasting the end of history or the clash of civilizations, the foreign policy scholars my seniors encouraged me to study pointed towards “ungoverned spaces” as the global hotspots where American warriors were most likely to fight. The concern grew when Afghanistan’s stateless areas served as staging grounds for the 9/11 attacks, and again in Iraq when the Coalition Provisional Authority blamed postwar instability on a lack of good governance. Having removed my uniform and traveled through many ungoverned—or, more accurately, unconventionally governed—spaces, I question the value of building national security policy around the need to develop states. Assumptions that good governance can only exist through state structures often result in flawed, ineffective policy responses that satisfy bureaucrats without altering ground condit...