How Political Science Can Be Most Useful – with Jack Knight

Agatha Christie’s murder mystery The Mousetrap is the longest running play in history. Its first run began in 1952, and it hasn’t stopped since. Another perennial whodunnit — “Who Murdered Political Science” — is mounting a strong challenge for the runner up. Regularly repeated performances haven’t stopped audiences from enjoying the traditional denouement, in which the detective accuses Quantitative Methods and Game Theory of conspiring to bash the victim’s head in.

Discerning critics were unimpressed with Michael Desch’s recent “cult of the irrelevant” production, which played recently in this magazine. They found it too reminiscent of past stagings — all recycled quotes and stale nostalgia — and would have preferred a more novel interpretation. Even so, like Christie’s play, it’s a traditional crowd-pleaser.

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Essay

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It’s a rare buccaneer who runs a book club. But in October 2012, the chief administrator of the Silk Road drug market, under the pseudonym “Dread Pirate Roberts,” was on the dark web assigning readings from the anarchist libertarian philosophy of Murray Rothbard. Roth­bard had argued that markets and individual connections were really all we ...
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Academic Article

Regulating Information Flows: States, Private Actors and E-Commerce

Growing interdependence between jurisdictions means that states are increasingly using private actors as proxies in order to achieve desired regulatory outcomes. International relations theory has had difficulty in understanding the exact circumstances under which they might wish to do this. Drawing on literatures in both international relations and legal scholarship, this article proposes a framework ...
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