DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE

Why did it come to this, who has what interests and what happens now? Questions from Mitri Sirin to the professor for international politics Marina Henke.

"Kabul fell, the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan and it was therefore necessary to anticipate the withdrawal of the United States and the Coalition. What to do now? The answer depends on what you want to achieve."

Afghanistan, the anatomy of a strategic debacle and a human tragedy They talk about it: Mimosa Martini., Michele Boldrin, Andrea Gilli and Mauro Gilli.

Political scientist Malejacq does not currently see a hugely increased threat from Afghanistan for international terrorism. The Taliban are mainly concerned with Afghanistan itself. But Al-Qaeda and IS are still present in the country. He believes the ties between al-Qaeda and the Taliban are important for the new rulers in Kabul: an outright break with the terror group could be bad for some of the Taliban's rank and file. In Khorasan province, there is a branch of IS that, according to Malejacq, has little support in Afghanistan, is relatively small and is at war with al-Qaeda.

“The way the Taliban has taken over so quickly this week reveals how shallow the U.S. effort really was: A Potemkin village in Kabul funded by U.S. taxpayers and kept standing by never-ending U.S. military activity. Since 2002, the U.S. has been propping up a puppet government in Kabul for week after week, decade after decade, president after president. Repeated promises by the U.S. military that victory was just around the corner were fantasy. Biden deserves a lot of credit for taking the U.S. out of the picture."

How does protest advancing diverse claims turn into violent conflict occurring primarily along ethnic lines? This book examines that question in the context of Syria, drawing insight from the evolution of conflict at the local level. Kevin Mazur shows that the challenge to the Syrian regime did not erupt neatly along ethnic boundaries, and that lines of access to state-controlled resources played a critical structuring role; the ethnicization of conflict resulted from failed incumbent efforts to shore up network ties and the violence that the Asad regime used to crush dissent by challengers excluded from those networks. Mazur uses variation in the political and demographic characteristics of locales to explain regime strategies, the roles played by local intermediaries, the choice between non-violent and violent resistance, and the salience of ethnicity.

Taking an inter-disciplinary approach, Spruyt explains the political organization of three non-European international societies from early modernity to the late nineteenth century. The Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires; the Sinocentric tributary system; and the Southeast Asian galactic empires, all which differed in key respects from the modern Westphalian state system. In each of these societies, collective beliefs were critical in structuring domestic orders and relations with other polities. These multi-ethnic empires allowed for greater accommodation and heterogeneity in comparison to the homogeneity that is demanded by the modern nation-state.

According to Srivastava, the project is guided by two questions: “What are the major political harms (e.g., mass surveillance and behavior modification) related to Big Tech?” and “How well does regulation (e.g., government law suits and public hearings) around the world remedy those harms?”

"From Social Security to Medicare, the Civil Rights Act to the Affordable Care Act, Democrats have long treated policy success as if it were tantamount to political success, assuming that the enactment of significant legislation would create supportive constituencies that would reward the party at the voting booth. President Obama appears to have made the same calculation. Instead of working to strengthen his party organization with an eye toward improving Democrats’ electoral prospects across the board, he focused almost exclusively on achieving significant policy accomplishments, assuming that those policy successes would redound to the party’s electoral benefit (Galvin 2010, 2016)."

While the researchers state that their results do not indicate that social media platforms are “killing people,” as Biden said, they do find, however, that those who relied on Facebook for COVID-19 news had substantially lower vaccination rates than the overall U.S. population. Those who received most of their news from Facebook also displayed lower levels of institutional trust and greater acceptance of misinformation. “We certainly cannot say the platform causes vaccine hesitancy, but it does seem like a place where such people gather,” said IPR political scientist James Druckman. “That makes it all the more important to ensure the provision of accurate information on Facebook.”