Russian gas games or well-oiled conflict? Energy security and the 2014 Ukraine crisis

This essay explores the link between energy security and the 2014 Ukraine crisis. Whenever there is an international conflict involving a major oil or gas producer, commentators are often quick to assume a direct link, and the Ukraine crisis was no exception. Yet, the various avenues through which energy politics have affected the Ukraine crisis, and vice versa, are not well understood. This paper seeks to shed light on the issue by addressing two specific questions. First, how exactly did energy contribute to the crisis in the region? Second, can energy be wielded as a ‘weapon’ by Russia, the EU, or the US? We find that Russian gas pricing played a crucial role as a context factor in igniting the Ukrainian crisis, yet at the same time we guard against ‘energy reductionism’, that is, the fallacy of attributing all events to energy-related issues. We also note that there are strict limits to the so-called energy weapon, whoever employs it. In the conclusion we provide a discussion of the policy implications of these findings

A crude reversal : the political economy of the United States crude oil export policy

Why did the United States (US) lift its forty-year old oil export ban in 2015? Press coverage has offered various answers, such as the decline in crude oil prices and the rise of US tight oil production. Yet, these explanations are incomplete. Prices have declined in the past without a policy change and, in spite of the shale revolution, the US remains a net oil importer. Here, we argue that the repeal of the ban was driven by the confluence of multiple streams in the policy process: a policy problem created by the spread between US and international crude prices, a policy solution advocated by a constituency with growing voice and power, and a window of opportunity offered by falling international oil prices and the budget deal in late 2015. The analysis is a reminder that the policy process behind ostensibly rational energy policies is often less coherent than might be assumed

The abandoned ice sheet base at Camp Century, Greenland, in a warming climate

In 1959 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built Camp Century beneath the surface of the northwestern Greenland Ice Sheet. There they studied the feasibility of deploying ballistic missiles within the ice sheet. The base and its wastes were abandoned with minimal decommissioning in 1967, under the assumption they would be preserved for eternity by perpetually accumulating snowfall. Here we show that a transition in ice sheet surface mass balance at Camp Century from net accumulation to net ablation is plausible within the next 75 years, under a business-as-usual anthropogenic emissions scenario (Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5). Net ablation would guarantee the eventual remobilization of physical, chemical, biological, and radiological wastes abandoned at the site. While Camp Century and four other contemporaneous ice sheet bases were legally established under a Danish-U.S. treaty, the potential remobilization of their abandoned wastes, previously regarded as sequestered, represents an entirely new pathway of political dispute resulting from climate change

The Tumor Suppressor Gene, RASSF1A, Is Essential for Protection against Inflammation -Induced Injury

10.1371/journal.pone.0075483PLoS ONE810-POLN

Where Is International Relations Going? Evidence from Graduate Training

Recent debates about the state of International Relations (IR) raise the possibility that the field is losing its theoretical innovativeness due to professional incentives to churn out publications. Yet the claims made about IR far outstrip the availability of empirical data. Important assertions derive from a handful of examples rather than systematic evidence. This paper presents an investigation of what gets taught to doctoral students of IR in the United States. I find, among other things, that the type of research most frequently published in IR journals differs in systematic ways from the type of research taught to graduate students. In turn, this raises important questions such as whether certain types of valuable research face a relative disadvantage when it comes to getting published in the first place. The evidence also points to the partial separation of IR from Political Science in the United States. Further, it casts doubt on the growing practice of using Google Scholar to measure research influence. A new metric, which I call the Training Influence Score (TIS), supports the analysis

Mechanisms of informal governance: evidence from the IEA

How does informal governance occur in international organisations? While the existing literature suggests that power asymmetries matter a great deal for explaining the uncodified rules and procedures that often develop within international organisations, we argue that power asymmetries alone cannot explain informal governance. Consequently, we develop two specific mechanisms through which informal governance occurs. First, we suggest that regime complexity can act as a source of incentives and opportunities for informal governance. In the face of regime complexity, informal governance offers an attractive way of keeping states bound to the organisation and of managing complex interactions with adjacent regimes. Second, we propose that the coincidence of frozen formal structures and changing causal beliefs allows informal governance to emerge. Problems of great causal complexity are sometimes subject to swings in beliefs about cause–effect relationships, demanding new policy approaches. When such swings occur, and if it is costly to adapt an organisation’s formal rules, states and institutions often simply create unwritten, informal practices as a way to render the institution dynamic. The plausibility of our conjectures is illustrated with evidence drawn from the International Energy Agency