DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE

La calle también habla fuerte y claro. Varias ciudades están repletas de murales con pintas que demuestran lo que sentimos. (…) , es un mito que la ciudadanía peruana no lucha por sus libertades y derechos. Las protestas, aunque más dispersas y localizadas, no han cesado.

Since Election Day more than two weeks ago, several Northwestern professors have spoken at events about the reasons behind Donald Trump’s decisive victory — and the potential impacts of his second term. The Daily interviewed some of these professors on their perspectives surrounding Republicans’ recent election wins.

There’s a noticeable pattern across some of President-elect Trump’s Cabinet nominees: allegations of sexual misconduct or assault. Trump himself has been publicly accused of sexual misconduct and found liable in civil court of sexual abuse, and his return to office is raising questions about the future of the #MeToo movement. Law professor Deborah Tuerkheimer joins Laura Barrón-López to discuss.

In this week’s episode of Politics In Question, Lee and Julia talk with Chloe Nicol Thurston and Emily Zackin about the United State’s relationship to debt and debtors. Thurston is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University and Zackin is an Associate Professor of Political Science at John Hopkins University. They are the authors of The Political Development of American Debt Relief (Chicago University Press, 2024). What role has race played in the United States’ history of debt relief? How has debtor activism contributed to state-building? How has debt relief been connected to contemporary issues? These are some of the questions Lee and Julia ask in this week’s episode.

This book asks what distinctive contributions political philosophers might make when reflecting on obvious moral failures in public policy. I defend a particular kind of contribution: I argue that political philosophers can and should craft ‘strategic’ arguments for public policy reforms, showing how morally urgent reforms can be grounded, for the sake of discussion, even in problematic premises associated with their opponents. The book’s opening chapter provides a general defense of this approach, situating it within a broader conception of political philosophy’s social responsibilities. Subsequent chapters then apply strategic theorizing to a set of diverse policy issues.

This essay responds to the central critiques of Philosophizing the Indefensible advanced by Nuti, Kapelner, and Garcia-Gibson. Nuti and Kapelner pose general challenges to the strategic method driving the book. Garcia-Gibson focuses on this method’s application to green energy policies. I explain why I believe that both the general account of strategic theorizing presented in the book and its specific green-energy arguments withstand the critics’ scrutiny.

Discussions of the liberal international order, both inside and outside the academy, tend to take its necessity and desirability for granted. While its specific contours and content are left somewhat open in such debates, the idea that this international order is essential for global peace and stability is left largely unquestioned. What is more, the potential loss or end of this order is often taken to mean a return to anarchy, chaos, and disorder. In this essay, I question the presumed necessity and desirability of the liberal international order that most discussions of it seem to share.

It seems today that a sense of crisis permeates international affairs. From war to pollution to trade and beyond, there is much talk of the disintegration of the settled ways of doing things and fear of what comes next. The twenty-first century has turned sour for many believers in international order. This is not unique in history; order has been on the minds of writers for centuries, from Kant to Carr to Hedley Bull. It is hard to find a period in history when there has not been some sense of crisis. The problem of international order is both a perennial theme and an urgent contemporary concern. The essays in this collection broaden the conversation to consider the ambiguity, complexity, and contradiction within the concept of world order. Order is neither self-evident nor universally agreed upon; to the contrary, it is contested, political, and contingent.

In this essay, I use Martin Luther King Jr.'s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” to open questions about international order and disorder. The idea of order is central to modern discourse on international politics, but the concept is often ill defined and ambiguous. King's ideas clarify three issues: First, is order understood as an objective condition of a system or a political judgment about its suitability for social life? Second, does compliance with law lead naturally to order? And third, is order always preferable to disorder? The way King answers each question is somewhat different than the conventional wisdom in international relations. IR scholars typically assume that international order is a universal good and that compliance with law enhances it. King highlights the gap between order as defined by the authorities in Alabama and his own lived experience. I use the difference to map