International Politics, Security, and Methods
I’m honored to have joined the editorial board of International Studies Quarterly (ISQ), under the new lead editors Sam R. Bell, Elena McLean, and Jeffrey Pickering, and their team of associate editors, who picked up the reigns of ISQ from former lead editors Brandon Prins and Krista Wiegand at the start of 2024. ISQ remains the flagship journal of the International Studies Association (ISA) and I look forward to participating in the editorial board meetings and to working with the new team.
On January 18/19, I gave a workshop on Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) in Large-Scale Educational Assessment at the University of Oslo, Norway. The two-day workshop was organized by Associate Professor Nani Teig for members of the research group “Large-Scale Educational Assessment” (LEA) at the Faculty of Educational Sciences. Besides providing a thorough introduction to QCA and its application in R, based on my QCA book, the workshop further engaged with published QCA examples from the field of education, to explore the specific requirements of research designs based on LEA data. Many thanks to Nani Teig and her colleagues for the kind invitation to freezing cold but beautiful Oslo!
In December 2023, Chikura Publishing issued a Japanese edition of Qualitative Comparative Analysis: An Introduction to Research Design and Application, originally published by Georgetown University Press in 2021. The book was translated by Professors Nobukazu Azuma of Aoyama Gakuin University and Narimasa Yokoyama of Hosei University. Many thanks to the people at Georgetown University Press and Chikura Publishing for facilitating and implementing this translation. It was a pleasure to meet with everyone during my stay in Tokyo in May 2023. My heartfelt gratitude goes to Nobukazu Azuma and Narimasa Yokoyama for their thorough and timely work on the translation!
The book is available for orders on honto.jp, and amazon.co.jp, among others. More information about the book is available here (including open access online material). Japanese translations of the online material will also be made available through the publisher’s website.
Against the backdrop of my recent Politics and Governance article “Zeitenwende: German Foreign Policy Change in the Wake of Russia’s War against Ukraine” I was interviewed for an episode of the Let’s Talk About podcast series by Cogitatio Press. The episode was moderated by Rodrigo Silva. The video is available on YouTube. The publisher’s website also features an audio version. In the interview I speak about the main findings of my research on German foreign policy, which indicate that the country has undergone an international orientation change, based on Chuck Hermann’s criteria for this classic concept of Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA). That said, due to the ongoing and incomplete nature of the policy processes (and domestic decisions, including the recent constitutional ruling on the federal budget), it is uncertain whether the initiated changes will be permanently implemented.
I contributed a book chapter to The Handbook of Teaching Qualitative and Mixed Research Methods: A Step-by-Step Guide for Instructors, co-edited by Alissa Ruth, Amber Wutich, and H. Russell Bernard and recently published by Routledge. My chapter, entitled “Uncovering Causal Complexity with Qualitative Comparative Analysis” provides material for instructors to teach causal complexity and QCA usage through a combination of interactive lectures, homework materials, and in-class discussions. Overall, the Handbook presents a collection of 71 concise chapters on qualitative and mixed methods, covering diverse topics such as research ethics, sampling techniques for qualitative research, visual and participatory methods, linguistic analysis, network analysis, and six chapters on modeling and comparative analyses, which include my QCA chapter and, among others, a chapter on comparative ethnography by Raul Pacheco-Vega and a chapter on effective calibration practices by Claude Rubinson and Roel Rutten. The complete contents and further information on the Handbook can be found here.
