In the past decade or so, the field of Civil War studies has opened up more than ever before to include a growing body of work that seeks to understand the era and its war in continental, hemispheric, and transnational contexts. The last few years have seen a series of works published by historians who…
Category: Roundtables
Jervis Forum Roundtable 17-47 on Gavin, Wonder and Worry
A lawyer-statesman, a British historian, a think-tank analyst, and an American political scientist all walk into a bar and…Ok, perhaps that is a cheeky way to introduce this roundtable, but it also captures the intellectually and professionally diverse backgrounds of the reviewers of Francis Gavin’s arresting new book, Wonder and Worry: Contemporary History in an…
Jervis Forum Roundtable 17-46 on Phimister, Bulls, Bears, Boers and Brits
Historians of empire approach South Africa with the apprehension that amateur mountaineers feel when they look from the foothills to the intimidating heights of Everest. Just as no history of empire can avoid explaining the Anglo-South African War, so every contributor is acutely aware of the likelihood of failure. The literature is immense and complex;…
Jervis Forum Roundtable 17-44 on Egeland, The Struggle for Abolition
In the fall of 2025, President Donald J. Trump announced that the United States would return to nuclear testing.[1] While the announcement took many by surprise, it comes amid a nadir in US-Russian relations not seen since the late Cold War. Indeed, the prospects of averting an arms race and controlling nuclear weaponry become ever…
Jervis Forum Roundtable 17-43 on Wyne, America’s Great-Power Opportunity
Ali Wyne’s America’s Great-Power Opportunity: Revitalizing US Foreign Policy to Meet the Challenges of Strategic Competition takes on the idea of “Great Power Competition” that has become endemic in policy communities. Wyne argues that the concept itself lacks coherence and has been stretched, often through analogy, in a way that has led the United States…
Jervis Forum Roundtable 17-42 on Davy, Defrosting the Cold War and Beyond
The historical record of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) and its successor, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has been a mixed one. In general, scholars of Cold War history have had difficulty in getting the balance right with the CSCE. Its significance has been both over- and…
Jervis Forum Roundtable 17-41 on Kramer, The Fate of the Soviet Bloc’s Military Alliance
The dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in 1991 marked the formal end of the Soviet Bloc’s principal military alliance and closed a central institutional chapter of the Cold War in Europe. Yet the alliance’s rapid unraveling in the late 1980s and ultimate disappearance has often occupied the margins of accounts of the Cold War’s end,…
Jervis Forum Roundtable 17-40 on Schramm, Why Democracies Fight Dictators
Madison Schramm’s Why Democracies Fight Dictators makes important contributions to the study of political regimes and international conflict and of the relationship between cognitive biases, emotion, and identity in shaping threat perceptions among leaders of democracies. Previous research has identified dyads consisting of liberal democracies and personalist dictatorships as being especially conflict prone.[1] This book…
Jervis Forum Roundtable 17-39 on Walker, States-in-Waiting
On 14 August 2025, a range of student, church, religious, and other organizations representing the Naga community in India celebrated the 78th anniversary of the Naga state’s declaration of independence on 15 August 1947. The date passed without notice in the Western media, but was greeted warmly by the Secretary of General of the Unrepresented…
Jervis Forum Roundtable 17-38 on David-Fox, Crucibles of Power
Nadezhda Mandelstam, the famous Soviet poet, wrote about her experience of the Stalinist terror and her journey to the Gulag. It “wasn’t a question of just one dictator,” she explained; anybody who had the slightest power, “down to the humblest police official or doorkeeper” was also a dictator. She and her fellow inmates had previously…