In June of 2025, the drive from Northern Namibia to Swakopmund looked a little different than it has in past years. What are normally bare, fairly uncrowded roads were undergoing a massive overhaul. Construction vehicles with Chinese lettering lined the roadside and were used to work on it. Near Swakopmund itself, the signage for turnoffs…
Tag: South Africa
The Jervis Forum Article Review 176: Rabinowitz on Möser “‘A Fly in the Ointment'”
Robin E. Möser’s article “‘A Fly in the Ointment’: Apartheid South Africa’s Transnational Nuclear Network during the Cold War, 1953–1976” makes an important contribution to the emerging literature on nuclear proliferation in general, and, more specifically, to the literature which focuses on the relationship between different nuclear suppliers and nuclear clients. The question of how…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Review Essay 121: Bennich-Björkman on Mannergren, et al., Peace and the Politics of Memory
How can sustainable peace be achieved? This question surely stands as one of humankind’s most pressing imperatives, as a glance at today’s headlines will reveal. The answer, likely a bouquet of interconnected insights, is in high demand. Historically, the Versailles Peace Treaty, which left Germany humiliated and vindictive, taught statesmen and diplomats that peace cannot…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Review Essay 117: Miller on Fink, Undoing the Liberal World Order
What went wrong? The liberal international order had such promise. It began with the noblest of intentions, to establish a new era of peace on the bedrock of human dignity. After the wreckage of the World Wars there seemed little alternative. Spheres of influence, power balancing, empire: all had had their day and been found…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 15-30 on Gasbarri, US Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War in Africa
The reviewers of Flavia Gasbarri’s US Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War in Africa: A Bridge between Global Conflict and the New World Order, 1988–1994 are consistent in their overall praise for Gasbarri’s work. The main adulations from Poppy Cullen, Frank Gerits, and Robin Möser tend to focus on the fact that…
Roundtable 9-3 on Barriers to Bioweapons: The Challenges of Expertise and Weapons Development
Sonia Ben Ouagrham-Gormley’s outstanding Barriers to Bioweapons demonstrates that while it may be relatively easy to pick your poison, there are very significant barriers to manufacturing it. Her main argument, as our reviewers so clearly explain, is that making bioweapons—that is, ‘weaponizing’ biological agents such as anthrax, smallpox, plague, and many others—has been far more…
Review Essay 29 on The Bomb: South Africa’s Nuclear Program
Nic von Wielligh’s new book on the history of the South African nuclear project is a timely contribution to the on-going scholarly debate on why and how countries choose to develop, maintain and dismantle nuclear weapons programs. Since South Africa is the only country to date that has undergone a voluntary complete nuclear roll-back, its…
Roundtable 8-6 on Networks of Domination: The Social Foundations of Conquest
Voltaire famously observed that “God is always on the side of the big battalions” (5). International relations theorists and diplomatic historians have tended to find Voltaire’s explanation persuasive but, as Paul MacDonald shows in his provocative new book, peripheral conquest during the nineteenth century was a far more complicated endeavor than conventional warfare on the…
Roundtable 8-4 on Bargaining on Nuclear Tests: Washington And Its Cold War Rivals
Preventing sovereign states from acquiring and deploying a military technology that all but guarantees their security is beyond difficult. Early in the nuclear age, many United States policymakers and analysts thought that nuclear nonproliferation efforts were, at worst, impossible, and, at best, too costly. Despite this pessimism, the U.S. has made nuclear non-proliferation a priority…
Roundtable 7-17 on Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era: Regional Powers and International Conflict
How do we understand the nuclear strategies of regional powers and how successful are those strategies in deterring conflict? These are obviously important questions for students of world politics, but unfortunately they are also questions that have been largely ignored as scholars focused their attention on the nuclear superpowers of the bipolar era. Of course,…