This Protestant feels confused: On moral authority and the Pope-Trump divide As I have discussed here, I am a proud Protestant. I was raised Lutheran, and am now Episcopalian. While there is some variation among Episcopalians and Anglicans over whether they see themselves as Protestant, both my…

I have a new open-access article out in Global Studies Quarterly, “What’s at Stake in the Indigenous Empire Debate,” in which I argue against historian Pekka Hämäläinen’s claims that the Comanche and the Lakota constituted empires.

The Gulf is a vital lynchpin of global stability, and it goes far beyond energy The US and Israel’s war on Iran and regional instability threatens to disrupt critical global migration patterns. These serve as vital pressure release valves for overcrowded and socio-economically stagnant mega cities…

The Scripts We Perform: Militarized Masculinity and the Gendered Order Over the past month, U.S. President Donald Trump has shifted from misogynistic jabs to full‑scale performances of militarized authority, an evolution entirely consistent his political brand of hegemonic, martial masculinity. In…

Religious nationalism makes the profane sacred: True faith uses the sacred to heal the world For Western Christians, Holy Week—the most important time of the church calendar—just finished. Like many other Christians, it is a powerful and challenging time of the year. We are meant to reflect on how…

Watching Scientific Progress in Action Reacting to a recent event on the study of religion, conflict and peace

Was I wrong on the Gulf states and Iran? An exercise in academic humility When I was in graduate school, my training included the methods and theories of international relations but also some of the epistemology and philosophy of science behind the sub-field. We discussed what makes a good…

The Best and Worst of U.S. Foreign Policy(?) The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) recently published results of a survey of historians on the best and worst foreign policy decisions in U.S. history.

6+1 Questions about Exit from International Organizations What is the name of the book and what are its coordinates? The book is Exit from International Organizations: Costly Negotiation for Institutional Change. It was published in June 2025 by Cambridge University Press. What’s the argument?…

Iran and the shadow of the Kosovo intervention When I was in grad school in the mid-aughts, one Professor was a die-hard supporter of George W. Bush’s foreign policy. When challenged over the legality of Iraq, he noted that it is inconsistent for any liberal to oppose the invasion of Iraq while…

Rubio’s civilizational appeals will backfire US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s speech at the Munich Security Conference demonstrated he is a better diplomat than Vice President J.D. Vance, although that’s not much of a hurdle to clear. Where Vance gave a bullying lecture, Rubio’s speech focused…

“Fair Trade” and the revenge against the “Foreigner”: From Chamberlain to Trump A century before Trump’s tariff threats, Joseph Chamberlain pitched the same idea: use duties as a “big revolver” to force rivals into “fair trade.” That history helps explain why “unfairness” rhetoric and coercive…

What’s with all the racism? I’ve been wanting to write this post for some time. But every week just brings more bad news. More terrible examples. In November last year, the Dutch government almost collapsed over racist remarks made by one of the coalition government ministers. December was witness…

An Accidental Academic: 20 Years Later This is my 20th year at the University of Texas. Although my dad was a university professor, I'm something of an accidental academic. I sought to get my PhD with the hopes of doing something more in terms of public service. I started off my PhD at Georgetown…

How To Review Efficiently and Fairly Instead of Dry January, I'm going review free for January after having nearly 80 review requests last year. My New Year's resolution was to have a healthier relationships with reviewing, which had become a part-time, unpaid job (though I recognize that I'm…

Renee Goode and the limits of false terrorism charges On 7 January, US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents opened fire on Renee Goode, killing her. To be honest, I wanted to write a post on just how sad and terrifying this murder was. How wrong it is that ICE agents are targeting…

Trump, US foreign policy and Venezuela: Aberration or Honesty? In my international relations classes, I encourage my students to not just express their (mostly negative) views of Trump’s foreign policy. I also ask them to reflect on the extent to which Trump’s actions are in line with the history…

Is Peer Review Broken? Should Reviewers Be Paid? My New Year's resolution for 2026 is to somehow make peace with reviewing for journals. Something is amiss, at least for me, but perhaps it reveals a larger problem related to journal and book publishing. I kept a running tally of review requests…

Remembering Our Lost Colleagues I started this post sort of confessionally. It's been a while since I wrote on the blog. I had started one earlier this year on the destruction of USAID and PEPFAR but redirected my energy into advocacy (such as it was). One reason for my relative absence on the…

Farewell The Hayseed Scholar podcast has come to a close. In this farewell episode, Brent's brother Kyle hosts it and they chat about the podcast and why Brent is closing it down. Two friends of the pod, Matt McDonald and Jelena Subotic, also join to mention what they liked and what they…

Can the news ever be impartial? Probably not, but the problem isn't impartiality it's the politics of impartiality On November 9th, the director general of The BBC, Tim Davie, along with the head of news, Deborah Turness, resigned. Their resignation was in response to a report published in the…

Here We Go Again: Why American Presidents Can’t Resist Regime Change The U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean is confusing the MAGA faithful. With rumors swirling of an imminent operation to topple Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, the president’s supporters are asking what happened to “America…

Bullies, Follies, and Decadent Orders: Constructing Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern  On November 1, 2025, President Donald Trump threatened to end all U.S. assistance to Nigeria and — if he deemed it necessary — launch a military attack against insurgents in the country. As National…

Exploring the Meaning of Responsibility I’ve been thinking a lot about the meaning of “responsibility,” specifically in the context of politics and governance. We live in an age of populism, rising authoritarianism, disinformation, climate change, and the slaughter of civilians in places like Gaza…

Nuclear apocalypse now? Reflections on the movie “House of Dynamite” I had high hopes for director Kathryn Bigelow’s House of Dynamite, a new Netflix movie about U.S. nuclear command and control. There’s so much potential for cinema to unpack the dilemmas and tragedies of living under a nuclear…

6+1 Questions About “The Social Construction of Christian Persecution through Quantification in International Religious Freedom Advocacy” What is the name of the journal article (or book) and what are its coordinates? Miray Philips. 2025. “The Social Construction of Christian Persecution through…

Ceasefire NOW (but not *now*) After years of calls for a ceasefire in Gaza, a ceasefire was recently announced and…those calling for the ceasefire are upset about it. There are some valid reasons to hold off on celebrating, but I worry this represents a deeper issue with how we conceive of peace…

Antisemitism, Israel and the Problem with no Easy Solution Debates about Israel and Palestine have, as one scholar remarked to me, become the “third rail” in British academia. That needs to change. The terror attack in Manchester makes clear that UK academics must engage in a public, thoughtful,…

The Mirage of Great-Power Competition Photo by Dave Photoz on Unsplash Back in March, I wrote a post at Lawyers, Guns and Money called “Remember ‘Great Power Competition?’ Lol.” As the “Grand Strategy” of Trump 2.0 comes into focus, I thought it would be a good idea to revisit and update it. In…

The State of the Union is Grim The Republic as we knew it is over. The fight now is whether the new one will be a fascistic, competitive authoritarian regime or a pluralist democracy that, one hopes, is better than what came before.

6+1 Questions about American Conquest: The Northwest Indian War and the Making of US Foreign Policy What’s the name of the book, and where can we find it? American Conquest: The Northwest Indian War and the Making of US Foreign Policy (Stanford University Press, 2025). What’s the argument?…

Will the recognition of Palestine matter? What IR scholarship says The UN General Assembly meeting has seen a growing number of states recognizing a state of Palestine, including Western powers like France, the United Kingdom and Canada. Debate has swirled over why they are doing this: is it a…

Trump’s Foreign Policy and the Purpose of the MAGA State How can we understand Tump 2.0 foreign policy? It's the product of the fusion of two different forces: Christian Nationalism and Personalist Rent-Extraction.

How do we think about 9/11 in 2025? I used to feel compelled to write something on 9/11. Some of this was just to participate in the discourse, some out of fear that failure to do so would mean moving on and forgetting. In 2009--back when I provided free labor for The Huffington Post--I wrote this…

Benjamin de Carvalho Dr. Benjamin de Carvalho joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast. Ben was born in Switzerland to a mother from Norway and a father from Brazil. Ben talks about how that transpired, growing up in Norway, and how a Fulbright brought him to the United States in the late 90's. Ben…

Who wants AI in the classroom? I get emails. Sometimes they find me well; sometimes they try to convince me that I need to bring artificial intelligence (“AI”) into the classroom. “AI is going to revolutionize higher education!” “Prepare your students for the AI-driven job market!” "Resistance is…

6+1 Questions about “The U.S.: A (Mostly) Hands-Off Superpower” Drew Hogan answers 6+1 questions about how the United States does, and does not, support its overseas citizens.

Is there a strategy behind Rubio’s State Department cuts? The foreign policy world is still making sense of the Trump Administration's massive cuts to the US State Department last week. Under Secretary of State Marco Rubio, nearly 1500 employees--most of them civil servants--lose their jobs. In…

After Anarchy? On Hierarchy, Heterarchy, and Multiplicity Kenneth Waltz famously claimed that anarchy—i.e., the absence of a global sovereign—is the ordering principle of world politics, and much International Relations (IR) scholarship since then has aimed to debunk the claim that anarchy defines…

Why have so many Muslim communities embraced radicalism? Over two decades have passed since the horrifying 9/11 attacks. Do we have a consensus understanding of the radicalization process in communities that supported or filled the ranks of jihadist groups, including the likes of al-Qaeda, the…

What’s the Matter with Soft Power? I dislike the term “soft power.” We owe the term to the late, great Joseph Nye. He popularized it in his 1990 book, Bound to Lead. Nye’s book was, first and foremost, an intervention in the “declinism” debates of the later 1980s. Japan was at the peak of its…

Resisting a narrative on Israel and antisemitism I've had four potential posts on Israel, anti-Israel actions and antisemitism this week. As new events occur, the old post falls to the wayside. I was stuck on whether I should pick one, or try to weave the events together into some kind of…

Probiotic disinformation “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in” is something I would say at the risk of alienating the younger readership of this blog, but given that most of us are old here, it should be fine. I have been busy working on Russian Neo-Nazis, so I almost forgot that…

The Vatican’s Quiet Intelligence Legacy and Why It Matters Now On Easter Monday, Pope Francis died at the age of 88. His passing marked the end of a 12-year papacy characterized by a commitment to the poor, an insistence on peace over posturing, and an often-controversial emphasis on mercy over…

The frustrating wisdom of Pope Francis’s international mediation I was born a proud Protestant. A Lutheran in a town still marked by Catholic-Protestant tensions, with Catholic friends who told me I don't worship right, neighbors who claimed Catholics were polytheists, and a grandmother who wore…

Unreal climate ‘realism’ It’s hard to keep track of the problems confronting Americans these days. But, just in case a reminder is needed, climate change is still a thing. Casual observers may have noted that US climate policy has been…underwhelming, see-sawing between ‘Build Back Better’…

Big Man, Big Heart This a crosspost from Saideman's Semi-Spew. This week, we found out that Brandon Valeriano died. It is quite gutting as he had such a terrific spirit, and he was too damned young. Brandon stood out from the crowd at all the conferences as he was literally bigger than most of us,…

So much for “Great Power Competition” The buzzword of the first Trump administration was "Great Power Competition." That was also a lie.

Check it out: States sometimes unhelpfully instrumentalise their climate pledges as foreign policy documents. A piece I wrote on this phenomenon with my colleague Bill Kakenmaster has just been published on @duckofminerva.bsky.social www.duckofminerva.com/2024/12/clim...

Thoughtful post by @pehenne.bsky.social at @duckofminerva.bsky.social "If Assad fell so quickly now, after having 10 years to recover from the initial shock of the protests, would he have fallen equally quickly back then? And if so, were skeptics of intervention wrong?"