Month: December 2022

On December 13-15, I participated virtually in the 10th International QCA Expert Workshop and the 6th International QCA Paper Development Workshop at ETH Zurich and online. As in previous years, the event was organized by Manuel Fischer, Julia Leib, Johannes Meuer, Sofia Pagliarin, Ryan Michael Rumble, and Christian Rupietta. The QCA Expert Workshop brought together a group of 36 QCA experts and practitioners from around the globe, many of whom participated online to discuss methodological innovations and new empirical applications. One highlight was Charles Ragin’s presentation on his forthcoming book Analytic Induction (to be published in 2023). The preceding QCA Paper Development Workshop was the 6th event of this kind, which included more than a dozen roundtables and breakout rooms where 36 applied QCA papers were presented and discussed. I co-chaired a Q&A session with Seweryn Krupnik (Jagiellonian University) and Martin Schneider (Paderborn University), and Seweryn and I also co-chaired a roundtable at the Paper Development Workshop.

Since 2009, Contemporary Security Policy (CSP) annually awards the Bernard Brodie Prize to recognize “an outstanding article published in the journal in the previous year”. The award is named after the American military strategist Bernard Brodie (1910-1978), author of influential books such as The Absolute Weapon (1946), Strategy in the Missile Age (1959), Escalation and the Nuclear Option (1966), War and Politics (1973), and From Crossbow to H-Bomb (1973, with Fawn M. Brodie). As CSP acknowledges on its website, Brodie established “ideas that remain at the centre of security debates to this day”. Moreover, he was “one of the first analysts to cross between official and academic environments” and, importantly, Brodie “pioneered the model of civilian influence that CSP represents”. As Brodie underlined, for instance in War and Politics (1973): “the civil hand must never relax, and it must without one hint of apology hold the control that has always belonged to it by right.” On November 29, the journal announced its shortlist for the 2023 Bernard Brodie Prize and our open access article “Unintended Consequences of UN Sanctions: A Qualitative Comparative Analysis” (co-authored with Katharina L. Meissner, University of Vienna) was among those selected. The complete shortlist and a collection all previous prize winners can be found on the CSP website.