Roundtables

We brought together a team of experts to discuss the role of the military in mass protests in Africa over the last several years and its involvement in the process of democratization.

In this roundtable, our contributors review H.R. McMaster’s book “Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World.” They explore the implications of McMaster’s core arguments for U.S. national security policy, the future of conservative national security policy, and American civil-military relations.

In this book review roundtable, we asked a group of scholars and practitioners to review Richard Abel’s two-volume work, “Law’s Wars” and “Law’s Trials,” which looks at how the rule of law and America’s legal institutions fared in the “War on Terror.”

This policy roundtable looks at the role of gender and gendered analysis in conflict and security. The authors highlight ways in which gender intersects with political violence and security policy. As the chair observes, the analysis, “defies efforts to make gender a problem of ideology or an issue best relegated to the human resources department.”

In this roundtable, which grew out of a conference on maritime strategy in the Indo-Pacific region sponsored jointly by the United States Naval War College, the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Forces Maritime Command and Staff College, and the Sasakawa Peace Foundation, our contributors examine growing Japanese defense capabilities and aspirations. The authors examine the impact of a more robust Japanese defense capability on Japan’s defense and foreign policy, as well as regional stability and alliances.

In this policy roundtable, part of our special issue on cyber competition, the panelists explore whether cyber conflict might better be understood as a form of intelligence competition.

1. Introduction: Selling a Revolution Gregory Brew On Aug. 19, 1978, hundreds of people packed into the Cinema Rex theater in Abadan, Iran. The movie that night was The Deer, a 1974 film by acclaimed Iranian director Masoud Kimiai. Twenty minutes into the picture, a group of men locked the doors and set fire to […]

1. Introduction: Scientific Expertise, Bureaucratic Politics, and Nuclear Intelligence Galen Jackson In The Nuclear Spies: America’s Atomic Intelligence Operation Against Hitler and Stalin, Vince Houghton seeks to explain why the United States succeeded in producing valuable intelligence on Nazi Germany’s nuclear weapons program but failed to do so in the case of the Soviet Union.1 […]

Why would a state that lacks nuclear weapons choose to fight a state that has them? In this roundtable, our authors evaluate Paul Avey’s explanation for this phenomenon.