The Dynamics of Power Politics

Summary:
This seminar will give an overview of an in-process book manuscript, The Dynamics of Power Politics (with Paul MacDonald and Daniel Nexon), which develops a relational-network approach to power political mobilization. Much of international relations theories assume that states have access to “stocks” of power, that military, economic, and diplomatic tools are readily available and ready to deploy in power-political competition. Professor Goddard will discuss how scholars should orient their analysis of great power competition around processes of collective mobilization and demobilization, with the goal of identifying the strategies of mobilization that replicate across time and space.

Bio:
Stacie Goddard is Director of the Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies and the Arnold A. Saltzman Professorship at Columbia SIPA.
 
Goddard served as the Betty Freyhof Johnson ’44 Professor of Political Science and Associate Provost for Wellesley in the World at Wellesley College, where she has taught since 2005. Her research and teaching focus on great power competition, with particular attention to the global politics of legitimacy and revisionist powers. She is also a Faculty Affiliate with the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University and formerly served as faculty director of the Madeleine Korbel Albright Institute for Global Affairs at Wellesley.
 
Her most recent book, When Right Makes Might: Rising Powers and the Challenge to World Order (Cornell University Press, 2018), examines how a rising power’s legitimation strategy shapes whether great powers accommodate or confront a potential challenger. Her first book, Indivisible Territory and the Politics of Legitimacy: Jerusalem and Northern Ireland (Cambridge University Press, 2010), explores how narratives of legitimacy are used to secure contested territory. A third book, Dynamics of Power Politics, coauthored with Paul MacDonald and Daniel Nexon, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2027. Her articles have appeared in International Security, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, and other leading journals, and her public writing has been published in Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.
 
She has held fellowships at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University, the Security Studies Program at MIT, and the Center for Advanced Studies at Ludwig Maximilian University Munich, among others. She earned a BA from the University of Chicago and a PhD in political science from Columbia University.