Event Date: February 11, 2025 - 11:30am to 1:00pm
Location: FSS 5028, 120 University Private, University of Ottawa
Presented by CIPS and the International Theory Network (ITN)
“Simply put, China was an integral part of what made the “New Right” new. –Joyce Mao
“Twenty years is about the length of time it takes a group of academics to storm the ramparts, take the citadel, and settle down to the fruits of victory.” -Andrew Abbott
Join us as Robert Vitalis shares his current research with us:
Ongoing archival research on the Cold War origins of what would come to be called “national security studies” in the United States shows that conservative thinkers, institutions, and foundations have been written out of post-1945 academic R history as thoroughly as the African American thinkers I studied in White World Order (2015) were written out of the pre-World War II era.
While I started this project with a focus on the émigré grand strategists who came to prominence in the 1950s, the history of militant interventionist thought begins in the 1940s and the agitation for an alternative to containment in the case of international communism’s 1949 victory in China and the 1950 war in Korea. That moment, the work of militant anti-communist theorists, and the long engagement of political scientists with China that precedes and in part explains the first of the two civil wars in post-World War II East Asian studies have been erased from recent scholarly memory.
Speaker:
Robert Vitalis taught political science for 37 years, the last 25 of them at the University of Pennsylvania. The London Guardian named his America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier, a book of the year in 2006. His next book, White World Order, Black Power Politics, 2015, was awarded Sussex University’s international theory prize. His newest book, Oilcraft: The Myths of Scarcity and Security That Haunt U.S. Energy Policy, was published in 2020.
Moderator:
Srdjan Vucetic is a Professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. His research interests involve American and Canadian foreign and defence policy and international security. Prior to joining the GSPIA, Srdjan was the Randall Dillard Research Fellow in International Studies at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge.