So it's been a little while since I've posted here (very busy times these are). Anyway, I wanted to link to this post by Phil Arena over at his blog. Phil discusses how his views on various topics related to IR have changed over the past few years. I agree with a lot of what he has to say on these issues–I think a lot of what IR scholars focus on, to the extent that we're interested in the domestic forces generating foreign policy outcomes, tend to place too much stock in the qualities we typically assume to characterize democracies and autocracies. I also agree that economic forces play a huge role in shaping the incentives of political actors–particularly the elites that Arena mentions.
Michael Flynn is a professor in the Department of Political Science at Kansas State University. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Binghamton University in 2013. His research focuses on the political economy of foreign policy with a specific focus on security cooperation and military deployments.