Research

Reviews and capsule reviews: 

Foreign Affairs 98(1): 2019, 194-194 (here); Perspectives on Politics 17(1): 2019, 184-189; Political Quarterly 90(2): 2019, 331-333.  

For ordering information, see here (publisher site) and here (Amazon).

A gated online version is available at Oxford Scholarship Online (here). 

Short description: 

In this book, I address a big puzzle: most states in the international system are ‘weak’ states, states unable to monopolize violence or provide public goods, and yet the nation-state remains the primary organizational form for world politics. I show why states everywhere face popular dissatisfaction with their performance, and why addressing this dissatisfaction – through institutional alternatives to the state like the European Union, or through higher taxation – is so difficult.

For more context on the book, please see the UBC Political Science Research Portal. For a discussion applied to Latin America, see this blog post.

The book is based on my dissertation: Expectations of Order: State Failure in Historical Context. 

Articles 

Arjun Chowdhury and Raymond Duvall. 2014. "Sovereignty and Sovereign Power." International Theory 6(2): 191-223.   

Arjun Chowdhury and Scott Fitzsimmons. 2013. "Effective but inefficient: understanding the costs of counterterrorism." Critical Studies on Terrorism 6(3): 447-456. 

Arjun Chowdhury. 2011. "'The Giver or the Recipient?'" The Peculiar Ownership of Human Rights." International Political Sociology 5(1): 35-51. 

Arjun Chowdhury and Ronald Krebs. 2010. "Talking about Terror: Counterterrorist Campaigns and the Logic of Representation." European Journal of International Relations 16(1): 125-150.  

Arjun Chowdhury. 2009. "Failed States: Inside or outside the 'flat' world of globalization? A Review Essay." Security Dialogue 40(6): 637-659. 

Arjun Chowdhury and Ronald Krebs. 2009. "Making and Mobilizing Moderates: Rhetorical Strategy, Political Networks and Counterterrorism." Security Studies 18(3): 371-399.

Arjun Chowdhury. 2007. "The Colony as Exception (Or, Why Do I Have to Kill You More than Once?)" borderlands e-journal 6(3).

Book Chapters

Arjun Chowdhury. 2017. "International Norms in Postcolonial Time." In Charlotte Epstein (ed.), Against International Relations Norms: Postcolonial Perspectives, 106-122. New York: Routledge. 

Arjun Chowdhury. 2013. "Sovereignty out of Joint." In Sigal Ben-Porath and Rogers Smith (eds.), Varieties of Sovereignty and Citizenship, 15-34. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

    Reviewed in Nations and Nationalism 20(3): 2014, 595-596. 

Arjun Chowdhury. 2012. "Shocked by War: The Non-Politics of Orientalism." In Tarak Barkawi and Keith Stanski (eds.), Orientalism and War, 19-37. London/New York: Hurst/Columbia University Press.  

    Reviewed in Asian Affairs 45(2): 2014, 333-335; War in History 22(3): 2015, 407-409. 

Raymond Duvall and Arjun Chowdhury. 2011. "Practices of Theory." In Emmanuel Adler and Vincent Pouliot (eds.), International Practices, 335-354. New York: Cambridge University Press. 

    Reviewed in Perspectives on Politics 12(1): 2014, 276-278. 

Unpublished papers

Arjun Chowdhury and Aaron Rapport. 2013. "Leveraging State Weakness: How Autocrats Survive in a Hostile World."

Arjun Chowdhury. 2015. "Do states indeed overreact to terrorist attacks?"

My co-authors

Bud Duvall, University of Minnesota

Ron Krebs, University of Minnesota

Aaron Rapport, Cambridge University

Scott Fitzsimmons, University of Limerick