Description:

Please join the International Relations Speaker Series as they host Paul Poast, Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and Committee on International Relations at the University of Chicago, for a presentation titled "Man, Russia, and War".

Playing off the title of Kenneth Waltz’s famous book, this project offers a critical assessment of how scholars theorize and evaluate international security. Are security scholars studying general principles of international relations, or are we simply studying Russian foreign policy? The core conflict events and key periods of history from which security scholars draw their evidence and theoretical inspiration are heavily influenced by Russia's behavior or by responses to Russia's behavior. From the causes of war and the role of nuclear weapons in crises, to the arms trade and third-party support for rebel groups, Russia is a critical producer of these data. Given the centrality of security in the development of international relations as a scholarly endeavor, all scholars of international relations (IR), not solely those that study international security, must contend with the following: rather than offering generalizable theories of state behavior, we are largely offering abstract descriptions of Russian foreign policy and the reactions of other states to Russian foreign policy.

Paul Poast is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science and Committee on International Relations at the University of Chicago. He is also a nonresident fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, a foreign affairs columnist for World Politics Review, and a research affiliate of the Pearson Institute for the Study of Global Conflicts.

At the University of Chicago, Paul serves as Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Political Science and Director of the Summer Institute for Social Research Methods. Additionally, he is a member of the Center for International Social Science Research advisory board, the College Council, and the Board of the University of Chicago Library. Paul also serves on the Chicago Council on Global Affairs Survey Advisory Board.

Paul studies international politics, focusing on international security (e.g. the economics of warfare; the motivations for border fortification), diplomacy (e.g. the formation of alliances; the purpose of international organizations), and the use of data to study international relations. He is the author or co-author of three books, The Economics of War (McGraw Hill-Irwin, 2006), Organizing Democracy (w/ Johannes Urpelainen, University of Chicago Press, 2018), and Arguing About Alliances (Cornell University Press, 2019), as well as papers in academic journals such as International Organization, World Politics, Political Analysis, the American Journal of Political Science, and the Journal of Conflict Resolution.