Uncle Bob in Lund

Of all our family members, it is really only Uncle Bob who regularly comes to visit. He visited us when we lived in Shanghai, in north London and now in Lund. Yes, he was in Lund last night, our little medieval university town in southern Sweden. I brought Diane and two daughters. Blood is thicker […]

More on internal exile

I’ve thought a lot about the internal exile which Brexit/Trump seems to have confined me to. It’s not good, it’s not responsible. As though I didn’t care anymore.  I was somewhat encouraged to read this from Tracy B. Strong, written in 2008 and relation to the Bush presidency, not Trump: “In what does tyranny consist? […]

Internal exile

I’ve gone into an external exile. I don’t follow the news anymore, don’t read things on-line and I don’t watch TV. It was Trump and Brexit that did it. I guess I’m in denial. I just don’t want to hear about any of it, I don’t want to follow the ins and outs of what […]

My web pages are back up again

These web pages have existed in various incarnations for some 15 years. During the last two years, however, they have been down more than up. I switched from WordPress to Joomla and it first it was a great choice. Joomla is powerful and I could do a lot of things that weren’t possible on WordPress. […]

Uncle Bob in Helsingborg

We went to see Uncle Bob last night — Bob Dylan was playing in Helsingborg which is only one town over from Lund where we live. I see Uncle Bob more often than most other members of my family, mainly since he comes to visit more often. I saw him in Shanghai two years ago, […]

Robert Dahl, 1915-2014

The head of the Yale political science department just sent around an email saying that Robert Dahl has died. He was 98. Dahl was the leading political scientists in the US, and arguably the world, for some 50 years. He made a name for himself in the 1950s by advocating a pluralist interpretation of politics. […]

National day — no way!

Today, June 6, is Sweden’s “national day.”  Our 4th of July, our 14 juillet. This is the first year I’ve been in Sweden on the national day. When I last lived here — in 1994 — there was no such thing. Only something called “the day of the Swedish flag,” which everyone ignored, and it […]

Robert Darnton on my publisher

https://youtu.be/H8nxRKjro5o I’m working on a textbook on the history of international relations. I have a contract with Open Book Publishers in the UK. The latest issue of the New York Review of Books has an article by the historian Robert Darnton where he mentions my publisher: Operating from Cambridge, England, Open Book Publishers also charges for PDFs, […]

Ringmar critiques Adler and Pouliot on international practices

This is fun! International Theory, one of the leading IR journals in the US, just published an article of mine which discusses a proposal by Emanuel Adler and Vincent Pouliot to use the notion of “practices” to unify the study of international politics. I’m deeply skeptical of this program. As the editors point out in […]