Search

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically disrupted instruction across higher education. What have International Relations scholars learned from the experience of teaching through this situation? Contributors to this volume consider three themes: how they have adapted to new modes of instruction, what constitutes appropriate care for our students amid crisis, and how we as an epistemic community should prepare for future disruptions.

In recent years, it's become increasingly clear that emotion plays a central role in global politics. For example, people readily care about acts of terrorism and humanitarian crises because they appeal to our compassion for human suffering. These struggles also command attention where social interactions have the power to produce or intensify the emotional responses of those who participate in them. From passionate protests to poignant speeches, Andrew A. G. Ross analyzes high-emotion events with an eye to how they shape public sentiment and finds that there is no single answer. The politically powerful play to the public's emotions to advance their political aims, and such appeals to emotion also often serve to sustain existing values and institutions. But the affective dimension can produce profound change, particularly when a struggle in the present can be shown to line up with emotionally resonant events from the past. Extending his findings to well-studied conflicts, including the War on Terror and the violence in Rwanda and the Balkans, Ross identifies important sites of emotional impact missed by earlier research focused on identities and interests.

The conclusion of International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) operations in Afghanistan in 2014 closes an important chapter in the history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). In this volume, European and US experts examine a range of perennial issues facing the Alliance, including relations with Russia, NATO's institutional organization and command structure, and the role of the United States in the Alliance, in order to show how these issues shape today's most pressing debate—the debate over the balance between NATO's engagement in security operations globally and traditional defense within the North-Atlantic region. The volume's contributors propose that NATO can indeed find a viable balance between competing, but not inherently incompatible, strategic visions. A theoretically informed, empirical account and analysis of NATO's recent evolution, this volume will appeal to both security scholars and practitioners from the policy community.