Erik Voeten

One would think that the main value of Western jihadists to terrorist organizations would be their passports and thus their ability to take the struggle directly to Western countries. Thomas Heghammer looks at the data in a new article in the American Political Science Review (open access, thanks Cambridge University Press). Most Western jihadists fight abroad and […]

Berkeley’s Martin Shapiro in the Law and Courts newsletter: One of the most difficult institutional taboos to evade, however, may be God’s prohibition on any Americanist employing comparative methods or any comparativist using the U.S. as one of the countries to be compared. Only glimmers of a “trans-Atlantic” study of politics have so far emerged. […]

The most recent issue of Foreign Affairs hosts an excellent debate between two visions for a future U.S. grand strategy  (thanks to Foreign Affairs for making both articles freely available for a limited period). On the one hand, Barry Posen makes a strong case that the U.S. should create a leaner security posture that would […]

The past decade has treated us to some excellent histories of international organizations. Paul Kennedy’s history of the United Nations, Harold James’ history of international monetary cooperation, and Erez Manela’s work on the League of Nations and the World Health Organization come to mind as just a few examples of a broader surge of interest […]

The most recent issue of Foreign Affairs hosts an excellent debate between two visions for a future U.S. grand strategy  (thanks to Foreign Affairs for making both articles freely available for a limited period). On the one hand, Barry Posen makes a strong case that the U.S. should create a leaner security posture that would […]

John Bellinger, the legal adviser for the State Department from 2005 to 2009, laments in this morning’s New York Times that the Obama administration has secured Senate approval for the fewest number of treaties of any President since World War II: The Obama administration has been slow to submit new treaties to the Senate, and only nine have […]

Last Saturday, I questioned skeptics who claim that the 2nd amendment and its interpretation by the Supreme Court prohibits meaningful regulation of gun sales and manufacturing. Indeed, I argued that Heller and other rulings may well make certain forms of gun control more palatable by diverting fears that new laws set us off on a […]

That is the key conclusion from a recent working paper (pdf, ungated) by Arindrajit Dube (UMass), Oeindrila Dube (NYU) and Omar Garcia Ponce (NYU): Does access to arms promote violent crime? We exploit a natural experiment induced by the 2004 expiration of the U.S. Federal Assault Weapons Ban to examine how the subsequent exogenous increase in the availability of lethal […]

In the aftermath of yesterday’s tragedy, several experts argue that new gun control measures are unlikely to succeed in part because of recent Court rulings that have strengthened the second amendment, including last week’s Seventh Circuit ruling written by Richard Posner (who cited this Monkey Cage post in the opinion!). I suspect this is true for some gun control measures […]