Henry Farrell

The decision by India’s Supreme Court to deny a patent to Novartis for Glivec has caused furore among US pharmaceutical manufacturers, who are calling for harsher and more punitive patent policies to be attached to new trade agreements. However, when you think about it, it’s quite weird that “intellectual property protection” has become an integral […]

Thomas Oatley thinks that it very plausibly did. His argument draws upon an interesting article (should be ungated) in the new issue of Perspectives on Politics, where he, Kindred Winecoff, Andrew Pennock and Sarah Bauerle Danzman argue that international political economy scholars pay too little attention to the structural characteristics of international politics. By concentrating […]

It’s been interesting to follow the progress of Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson over the last few years, from what I suspect (but don’t know – happy to be corrected) was a right-leaning centrism to a set of vigorous arguments about the pernicious consequences of inequality. This is perhaps comparable to Keynes, who was never […]

Brandon Valeriano has a working paper which gathers some quantitative data to take a look at cybersecurity issues. Like Gartzke, he finds that reports of cyber-war have been greatly exaggerated. even though there are 106 observed cyber incidents within 44 cyber disputes among 20 rivals, the intensity, duration, and level of attack remain low compared […]

This Strossian insight brought to you by The Browser Amazon isn’t a store, not really. Not in any sense that we can regularly think about stores. It’s a strange pulsing network of potential goods, global supply chains, and alien associative algorithms with the skin of a store stretched over it, so we don’t lose our […]

Mark Mazower has a good piece on Italy in the Financial Times. The turmoil produced by the Italian elections has directed attention back to where it should have been all along – to the politics of the eurozone crisis. We have had six months of complacency, rising stock markets and wishful thinking. The conventional wisdom […]

Jens Hainmueller and Dominik Hangartner have a new article in the American Political Science Review (ungated version here) that takes advantage of Switzerland’s high level of direct democracy to measure and understand the xenophobia of Swiss citizens. Some Swiss cantons allow citizens (or, in a couple of cases, a subset of long-established citizens) to vote […]

The recent Mandiant report has spurred a lot of debate over whether the US and China are moving towards more confrontational relations over cybersecurity. In a recent paper, Erik Gartzke argues that any confrontations are likely to be very limited. Gartzke is pushing back against the prevalent claim that the US is unprepared to deal […]

Robert Cottrell has a very nice long piece in the Financial Times on (inter alia) academic blogging. To read the blog of a political scientist, or an anthropologist, or a lawyer, or an information technologist, is the next best thing to reading their mind; better, in some ways, since what they have to say emerges […]