Erik Voeten

It now looks almost certain that the Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, will submit an application for statehood UN membership (please NYT and others: this is a subtle but important difference) to the UN Security Council (UNSC). Given that the U.S. has the right to veto the proposal and has already announced that it will do […]

The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) is not a legislature. If it passes a resolution, then this does not necessarily change anything in international law or international affairs. This doesn’t mean that its votes are always inconsequential (although many are). The UNGA is the only place where all states formally and publicly state their positions […]

Even though it is not yet clear what the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) will vote on, the prospect of a vote on Palestinian UN membership or observer state status is already causing both anticipation and anxiety.I plan to do a number of posts on this issue in the coming days; starting with an attempt […]

The Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism has a number of very interesting reflections by political scientists and others on what we have learned since 9/11. Among others, John Mueller offers his thoughts on the Iraq syndrome, Robert Pape on occupation and suicide terrorism, Richard Haass on how 9/11 is overestimated as a historical turning […]

What determines voter attitudes towards immigration? One view, supported by several empirical studies, is that voters’ opposition to immigration is driven in part by fears that immigrants will threaten their labor market opportunities. If this is so, then voters should be particularly opposed to immigrants that could replace them. So, high-skilled workers may like more […]

Conventional wisdom in political science and elsewhere is that voters value candidates who are consistent and whose policy stances are perceived as credible. I suspect that this holds true much of the time but there may be some important exceptions. Consider this snippet from David Brooks’ column on the possibility of a President Perry: First, […]

Perceived military successes almost inevitably invite declarations that a new era has emerged in which future military actions will follow the template created by the recent success; even though the dangers of such analogical reasoning are well understood. Dan Drezner takes Fareed Zakaria to task for doing exactly this. Zakaria argues that the Libya experience […]

Jay Ulfelder has a nice critique of pieces by David Bosco and Anne-Marie Slaughter in Foreign Policy magazine’s “future is now” special report: What Bosco and Slaughter have given us is the liberal institutionalist view of international relations in the early twenty-first century. Complex interdependence in the global political economy is creating new threats, but […]

My colleagues Dan Byman and Charles King have a great and instructive piece in the New York Times on phantom states, which they describe as: [..] places that field military forces, hold elections, build local economies and educate children, yet inhabit the foggy netherworld between de facto existence and international legitimacy. They use Taiwan as […]

The liberal citation behavior of Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik has put many bloggers, writers, and activists in the awkward position of having to distance themselves from someone who approvingly cites their thoughts as a justification for an absolutely horrific act. These debates are elevated to a different level when the accused is a politician […]