Blog

1. On the present-day, Geoffrey Macdonald studies the new generation of Bangladeshi political leaders and their views of foreign policy for a series from the National Bureau of Asian Research; some excerpts:

“Several domestic and international factors are coalescing to shape the foreign policy worldview of Bangladesh’s next generation of leaders, which has centered on more equitable international balancing. First, Bangladesh has emerged as a geopolitical swing state, which enhances its ability to hedge between regional and global powers to its advantage. . . .

Second, Bangladesh’s leaders are operating in a political environment of deep antipathy toward India, which incentivizes a foreign policy reorientation. In a 2025 survey, 60% of Bangladeshis said India has a negative impact on their country.[14] Negative perceptions of India stem from long-standing disputes over border killings, water sharing, and what many Bangladeshis view as anti-Muslim and anti-Bengali policies within India. These sentiments have intensified over the past fifteen years due to India’s political backing of Hasina and the AL. After the party’s removal from power, India’s decision to shelter Hasina, reject extradition requests, and amplify claims of anti-Hindu violence and rising extremism in Bangladesh further deepened public resentment. . . .

Third, the rise of Islamist politics has elevated politicians skeptical of India, creating political space for rebalancing Bangladesh’s foreign policy. In the February 2026 elections, Jamaat won 68 seats and received 31% of the vote, far outpacing its previous highs. Its electoral performance indicates the public’s growing openness to Islamist politics. Half of respondents in a 2025 poll said the influence of religion in politics had increased over the previous year . . . . .

U.S. foreign policy is also reshaping Bangladesh’s international perspective. Since January 2026, the Trump administration’s reduction of development assistance, uncertainty over trade and tariff policies, and broader unpredictability in foreign policy have strengthened incentives for Bangladesh to undertake a hedging strategy between major powers.. . .

Following the AL’s fall, the Yunus-led interim government previewed the distinct geopolitical direction that Bangladesh’s new parliament would take. Starting in August 2024, it continued to seek reciprocal benefits from the United States and China while creating greater distance from India.[22] The interim government sought stronger engagement with the United States and Western governments to restore international credibility, stabilize the economy, attract investment, and gain support for democratic reforms.[23] Concurrently, it maintained close economic and infrastructure ties with China, recognizing China’s importance as a major trade partner, investor, and defense supplier.[24] Although the interim government avoided a full rupture with India, it reviewed trade and transit arrangements, pushed back against Indian trade restrictions, and emphasized the need for equitable commercial ties. . . . .

Bangladesh’s new government and parliamentary players will likely continue this trend”

2. On a more historical note, this Umran Chowdhury post (part of his Bangladesh Statecraft Substack) provides a valuable chronology and summary of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s attempt to build a ruling party-state, in the form of BAKSAL (Bangladesh Krishak Sramik Awami League). This turned into a wildly counterproductive disaster. I was struck by this information on the origins of the idea:

“In the prelude to the fourth amendment, Mujib came into contact with the leaders of one party states in Africa, Europe and Asia. In 1973, he went to Algeria which was a one party state under the FLN. In Algiers, he met Fidel Castro who ruled over a one party communist state in Cuba. He also met African socialist leaders, including the founders of Senegal and Zambia who ruled over one party states in their respective countries. Mujib also met with Ba’ath Party leaders from Iraq and Syria where Arab nationalists had established one party states. In 1974, Mujib received medical treatment in the Soviet Union during the tripartite talks between India, Pakistan and Bangladesh in New Delhi. The former Yugoslavia developed close ties with the new state of Bangladesh and Marshal Tito was the first head of state to visit Mujib in Dhaka. Mujib also met with Ne Win, the Burmese dictator who ruled his country with an iron fist under the banner of the Burma Socialist Programme Party. At home, Mujib’s family was clamoring for a one party state. His nephew Sheikh Moni, who headed the wartime Mujib Bahini, submitted a petition on behalf of trade unions demanding a totalitarian socialist system.”

This Henry Farrell Substack post about AI and modern social science argues that we need to reorient much of our work toward the kind of “Big Structures, Large Processes and Huge Comparisons” that Charles Tilly advocated we study. Yet this is precisely not what a lot of political science (and more generally social science) research does these days:

“the social sciences now lay a much greater emphasis on identifying causal relationships, which tends to push away from the kinds of big secular shifts that he suggests we ought focus on.”

As a result, Farrell argues that “we don’t just need well funded and politically and economically independent social sciences to understand the consequences of AI, but also to reorient the social sciences so that they are again well suited to deal with big structures and large processes. We are in a world where it is urgently important to understand change at scale, since it is just such change that we are going through.2 The social sciences need both solid funding, and a lot of internal work to reorient themselves towards the questions that matter.”

This reminded me of a recent PS article by Guy Grossman, William Dinneen, and Carolina Torreblanca with tons of fascinating data on the nature of books and articles published in Political Science between 2003-2023. Their bleak summary:
“Our analyses show that publication volume has tripled during that time, driven by new entrants and increasing collaboration. The field has become increasingly quantitative but remains substantively diverse, even though individual papers have become more topically focused. Younger scholars publish more articles but fewer books and book chapters, signaling strategic adaptation to institutional rewards. Although novel research attracts, on average, more citations over time, it does not consistently translate into higher journal placement, encouraging safer, incremental publication strategies. Together, these patterns depict a discipline that is larger and more productive than ever yet is increasingly organized around measurable outputs, rather than intellectual risk-taking or theoretical innovation [emphasis added]”

If Farrell is right, this suggest that doing work on “the questions that matter” may be a real struggle for the discipline, which is increasingly accustomed to making its judgments largely a matter of mechanistically counting lines on a CV rather than reading and evaluating the content of those CV lines. I’m not a political science pessimist – there is lots of great work being done in the discipline of various kinds – but I do think the trends Grossman et al. point to are deeply worrisome. This is especially true in a context of crises of higher education that focuses PhD students and junior scholars (understandably) on pumping out as much as humanly possible as quickly as possible in a desperate bid to a land some career security.

This is a smart piece by Daniel Drezner on how Daniel Diermeier and Vanderbilt University’s political accommodation to the Trump era has ended up – even if popular with donors and a subset of parents – leading to bizarre and unworkable understandings of academic freedom. It seems like Vandy has decided Trumpism is the new normal and the only appropriate response is to fully accept its critique of higher ed (as opposed to acknowledging serious problems, but not entirely giving in).

If Trump’s approach to higher ed becomes hegemonic, then this will be justified as a clever tacking to the wind to aid Vanderbilt’s mission to move up the rankings; if instead it fragments and falters (perhaps in the face of a midterm wave or the 2028 election), then it will look like a craven miscalculation.

The post quotes a piece by Inside Higher Ed‘s John K. Wilson:

“Absolutely none of these extraordinary measures are “standard academic processes.” They are clear attacks on shared governance and academic freedom, and they are direct violations of institutional neutrality because the administration is favoring one ideological side in academic disputes over another. . . . the Vanderbilt declaration goes far beyond what the Trump administration dreamed of proposing for colleges, imposing an extreme attack on academic freedom, shared governance, international scholars, and free speech that may be unmatched in the history of statements by American college boards.”

Drezner concludes:
“Rather than embracing more restrictions on such speech, it sure would be great if Vanderbilt Chancellor Daniel Diermeier — a political scientist no less [Paul note: Diermeier’s time at UChicago was not great on the “broad-minded initiatives for the greater good” front, as opposed to the “move fast and break things in order to quickly become a university president, regardless what messes end up being left behind for others to deal with” front]— read Levy’s article. Because as much as Vanderbilt’s trustees might lament the decline of trust in universities, this kind of overt interference into the daily lives of academic will simply rode that trust even further.”

Whenever I teach my PLSC 26800 class (originally “Insurgency, Terrorism, and Civil War” and now “Political Violence”), I wander over to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program and Peace Research Institute of Oslo websites to update my slides on trends in armed conflict. UCDP has particularly useful maps and graphs.

This year, PRIO has published a very valuable report that summarizes trends in armed conflict and battle-related deaths. Looking at its summary of battle-related deaths since 1989 and 1946 (see both figures below), we can see a lull in the 2001-2011 period that is quite striking. At the time – with 9/11, the Iraq war, etc – it certainly didn’t feel that way, but it now appears to have been the most peaceful period of the post-Cold War era by quite a margin.

Their (grim) conclusion:
“This PRIO Paper confirms that the level of violence is increasing, that this now is part of a longer trend and not just a peak, and that a new, higher baseline of global violence has emerged. 2025 was the third most deadly year since the end of the Cold War, and we see that the period post 2013 has overall been more violent than the period prior to 2013 during the Cold War era”

One of the courses I regularly teach is a discussion-based, “great books”-esque seminar built around a small number of texts. I used to primarily evaluate students based on 3 take-home papers and class participation. In the AI era, those papers are incredibly easy to quickly outsource to Claude or ChatGPT (they are very well-equipped to answer “Locke and Hobbes: compare and contrast!”-style questions).

In the last couple of years I’ve been experimenting with trying to maintain skill-building in writing while dramatically expanding the oral/interpersonal side of the course. Below is my current (draft, changeable) cut at the course requirements that might be useful for those grappling with these issues:

I will also be teaching a mid-sized lecture class in which lots of oral exams are not scalable. Below is how I am approaching the assignments for that course, with a focus on in-class activities but also a take-home paper:

A good piece by David Wallace-Wells on how growing technological precision in warfare has not actually led to growing precision or limitation in the targeting of warfare. This is something I’ve been thinking a lot about as I revise my undergrad Political Violence class for the fall and thinking about future research areas – the blurring of categories of war (internal/external, criminal/political), the blurring of technologies (drones are now heavily used in African civil wars, for instance) , the blurring distinctions between war and normal politics (how precisely would be categorize pro-Iranian militias in Iraq or the Houthis in Yemen?). Some salient passages:

“All around the world, civilian power supply — technically off-limits, according to international law, wherever that still applies — has become a “frontline target” in a new kind of conflict, four experts wrote in the report, published last month. Electricity plants, substations, transmission grids — military planners have always taken note of these systems, along with hospitals and water systems and other logistical features of civilian infrastructure. But for decades it has been rare for great powers to openly target energy supply, and often a kind of humanitarian outrage followed when anyone did, which meant that a broad expectation of civility prevailed. “Such sanctuary,” the authors of the West Point report wrote, “is over.” Energy infrastructure has become a much more common target, particularly as conflicts drag on in regions temptingly full of power plants and pipelines. “All of a sudden,” says Morgan Bazilian, an energy-systems scholar at the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines and an author of the report, “our distaste for anything outside of the rules of war doesn’t look all that strong.” . . . .

There are more wars than there used to be — worldwide, the number of conflicts has nearly doubled over the last 15 years. These wars are bloodier, too, with the annual death toll more than twice as high in the 2020s as it was in the 2010s and nearly five times as high as in the 2000s. . . . .

In certain ways, drones have made war more precise. But they have also helped widen the scope of conflict. The front may be effectively frozen, but Ukrainian drones are now frequently striking Russian energy targets that not very long ago seemed not simply too far to reach but beyond the pale as well. Between 2022 and 2024, Ukraine’s attacks on Russian energy infrastructure roughly doubled. . . .

In Iran, we are seeing something different — not just energy warfare but energy war, a conflict fought over and within energy markets, with military operations designed primarily to shape global prices and global supply of fuel. . . . .”

A thoughtful piece by Asfandyar Mir on how Pakistan has situated itself in the Iran-US war:

“as both the Biden and Trump administrations have learned at great cost, modern conflicts cannot be walled off. Alliance-centric strategies, which promise that pooling the military and economic weight of many states will deter threats and, if necessary, defeat adversaries, have proved incapable of preventing or ending wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran. In a disordered world, that rigid approach is a liability. Creating pockets of stability requires flexibility of the kind practiced by Pakistan and its peers. . . .

To foster relationships with these mediators, the United States must show the same willingness to cross divides that the mediators themselves have displayed. Until 2024, a near consensus in Washington held that because the United States needed strong ties with India to balance China, it would have to shut out Pakistan. Trump defied that logic and took a personal interest in the relationship with Islamabad. When the crisis came, that departure proved valuable.”