Introduction

Welcome, readers, to FP‘s new blog, War of Ideas.

For those of you who have followed my writing at Passport for the last few years, this blog is going to be a bit different. Rather than following the day’s headlines, my goal here is to explore the theory, data, and scholarly debates behind world news. That could mean looking into social science research that expands our understanding of new developments. It could mean keeping an eye on the intellectual food fights playing out across university campuses and think tanks. It could mean delving into the books that are shaking up policy debates — or are about to.

But my broader goal with the project is to expand the definition of what we consider "foreign policy." Many FP readers are likely familiar with the latest strains of thought in, say, development economics, military doctrine, or political science. But I’m interested in exploring how fields as diverse as anthropology, linguistics, psychology, medicine, religion, or cartography can help us have a more informed conversation on global politics.

We’ll have some regular features that I’ll introduce as we go along, but expect healthy servings of charts, maps, surprising datapoints, and interviews with the kind of authors and personalities you don’t normally hear from on an international politics blog.

I’ll be learning along with you on many of these subjects, so I hope you’ll keep me on my toes. Please let me know what you find interesting, send suggestions for future topics, keep up the conversation on Twitter (@joshuakeating), and call me out when I screw up.

Let’s get started.