Aaron Belkin

'Bring Me Men' argues that American warriors must enter into a close relationship with the 'unmasculine' to define themselves. The case studies cover male-on-male rape at the US Naval Academy, as well as historical and contemporary attitudes towards cleanliness and filth.

Military Masculinity and the Benign Facade of American Empire, 1898-2001

Bring Me Men

Philip E. Tetlock

Political scientists often ask themselves what might have been if history had unfolded differently: if Stalin had been ousted as General Party Secretary or if the United States had not dropped the bomb on Japan. Although scholars sometimes scoff at applying hypothetical reasoning to world politics, the contributors to this volume--including James Fearon, Richard Lebow, Margaret Levi, Bruce Russett, and Barry Weingast--find such counterfactual conjectures not only useful, but necessary for drawing causal inferences from historical data. Given the importance of counterfactuals, it is perhaps surprising that we lack standards for evaluating them. To fill this gap, Philip Tetlock and Aaron Belkin propose a set of criteria for distinguishing plausible from implausible counterfactual conjectures across a wide range of applications. The contributors to this volume make use of these and other criteria to evaluate counterfactuals that emerge in diverse methodological contexts including comparative case studies, game theory, and statistical analysis. Taken together, these essays go a long way toward establishing a more nuanced and rigorous framework for assessing counterfactual arguments about world politics in particular and about the social sciences more broadly.

Logical, Methodological, and Psychological Perspectives

Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics

Geoffrey Bateman

Conservatives and liberals agree that President Bill Clinton's effort to lift the military's gay ban was perhaps one of the greatest blunders of his tenure in office. In this text, experts of both persuasions come together to debate the critical aspects of the gays-in-the-military issue.

Aaron Belkin

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