24 research outputs found
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Conceptualising and historicising the US foreign policy establishment in a racialised class structure
In recent years critical scholars of U.S. foreign policy have challenged the mainstream paradigm that fails to account for the racial dimensions of international relations. This article introduces a conceptual and historical analysis of the US foreign policy establishment that posits race and racism at its centre. While alluding to conventional theories of American power such as pluralism and statism, the article also highlights classical Marxism’s failure to acknowledge that US exceptionalism and racism conjoined in a manner that conferred a racial dimension to class politics. The article argues that the U.S. foreign policy establishment has been presided over by an elite or ruling elite; and irrespective of challenges from below, increasing diversity, or the insistence that America is a meritocratic classless society, the U.S establishment is at heart, elitist, racialised and generally Anglo-centric. The article identifies links between the racial dimensions of U.S. foreign policy and the identity profile of the power elite. The paper extends and critiques C. Wright Mills’ definition of the power elite by mapping its racial dimension. Finally the article argues that although the election of Obama represented a more inclusive and cosmopolitan version of the establishment, Obama’s presence has helped to consolidate the status quo as the structural constraints on the executive branch and symbolism associated with the election of the first African-American president has generally silenced the Left and quietly fostered the suggestion that an unconventional identity profile will not necessarily result in the change we can believe in
On the Evolution of Sport
Sports have received little attention from evolutionary biologists. I argue that sport began as a way for men to develop the skills needed in primitive hunting and warfare, then developed to act primarily as a lek where athletes display and male spectators evaluate the qualities of potential allies and rivals. This hypothesis predicts that (1) the most popular modern male sports require the skills needed for success in male-male physical competition and primitive hunting and warfare; (2) champion male athletes obtain high status and thereby reproductive opportunities in ways that parallel those gained by successful primitive hunters and warriors; (3) men pay closer attention than do women to male sports so they can evaluate potential allies and rivals; and (4) male sports became culturally more important when opportunities to evaluate potential allies and rivals declined as both the survival importance of hunting and the proportion of men who experience combat decreased. The characteristics of primitive and modern sports are more consistent with these predictions than those generated by intersexual sexual selection theories of sport