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#OpenAccess -
Realism, ideology, and exile - https://cup.org/3OnrUbp
"This article reconceptualizes the realist relationship with ideology in terms of a recurring experience of ideological exile"
- @lefteleven.bsky.social
#FirstView
American Century of Humiliation talk implies some optimistic assumptions about how and when it might come to an end.
Goya’s Fight with Cudgels (1819). Shows two men up to their knees in something, swinging blunt objects at one another. Seems likely they’re sinking.
I see the philosophers are fighting again.
Please share and/or consider applying to the Cambridge Amplifying Grant for underrepresented scholars. Applications are due next Monday, April 13. www.cambridge.org/us/universit.... This is a great opportunity!
Great University of Toronto weirdness here.
Job! the IR Dept at ANU is hiring an entry-level position to teach both at ANU in Canberra and, intermittently, into our joint program with Ritsumeikan University in Osaka. Details in the ad. Happy to answer questions. jobs.anu.edu.au/jobs/lecture...
In our latest issue, @lefteleven.bsky.social examines how Moscow’s colonialist practices at the height of Russian expansionism reveal a range of claims to imperial legitimacy: https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiaf270
Job! the IR Dept at ANU is hiring an entry-level position to teach both at ANU in Canberra and, intermittently, into our joint program with Ritsumeikan University in Osaka. Details in the ad. Happy to answer questions. jobs.anu.edu.au/jobs/lecture...
Photo of the Khaju Bridge in Isfahan, lit at dusk. It's beautiful.
The bridges of Isfahan, Iran, are historically and culturally important and, in case it needs saying, really should not be military targets.
Thanks!
Thanks!
Thanks to @felixroesch.bsky.social for reading a draft and for his important work in this area, which I'm building on here, as well as to others who are (I think) not on here, including Samuel Dixon, Cian O’Driscoll, Daniel Levine, and Toni Erskine. /end
Beyond a critical reading of realism and its history, the article sheds light on realism's troubled history with policy influence. It also unpacks the field of exile studies for IR and suggests possibilities for thinking more broadly of exile as metaphor as well as literal experience. /9
While the neorealists generally had no biographical experience of exile they (unwittingly) reenacted their predecessors' experience of ideological exile, falling out with, among others, the American conservative movement. /8
The classical realists thus experienced exile twice. I argue this second form of distinctively ideological exile recurred in the professional and political experiences of their descendants, the neorealists. /7
The classical realists, we know, were often political exiles, chiefly from wartime Europe. In America, they tried to make themselves useful to their new country. Yet many of them fell out with American liberal anticommunism over (inter alia) Vietnam. /6
Unlike realists, those ideologies often had visions of human flourishing, which motivate them and which they work to advance. The realists, grounding their program in prudence and security, mistrusted those visions. When their values came into conflict, their alliances broke down. /5
I begin with the realist refusal of an ideological vision of the good life. Realists center a vision of political prudence. Yet to advance that vision in modern mass societies, they have often allied with mass ideologies, through which to advance their program. /4
I conceptualize this pattern as "a recurring experience of ideological exile." I read the realist experience of exile as often taking a double form: one literal and the other ideological. /3
I begin with an observation: realists have a historical habit of falling out with their ideological allies—leftist, liberal, conservative, anticommunist, nationalist, and otherwise. How should we understand this pattern? /2
Very glad to see this article out in the world. In it, I argue for a critical reading of realism's political history, in terms of exile and how realists historically experienced it. /1
Job in the "History of War and International Relations in the Modern Period" at the University of Glasgow #HistIR 👇 www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DRA732/l...
The Washington Quarterly Spring 2026 issue cover
How do US elites and the public think about competition w/ China? And who finds what Chinese diplomatic signals reassuring/ threatening, and by how much?
Alex Yu-Ting Lin and I have a new article in @twqgw.bsky.social that answers these questions. Open access www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
“Perhaps you have forgotten. That’s one of the great problems of our modern world, you know. Forgetting. The victim never forgets. Ask an Irishman what the English did to him in 1920 and he’ll tell you the day of the month and the time and the name of every man they killed.
Most peaceful year of the rest of our lives.
JOB
Assistant Professor of Political Theory
University of Cambridge
@thecambridgeschool.bsky.social
www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/univers...
Grad school colleague of mine getting it right here.
I have never been more ready for anything in my life.
