Thanks to all those who came to my book talk on the national interest at my former uni - really enjoyable, and wonderfully engaged students.

Back at Kent to deliver research paper on distribution of power and provision of peacekeeping ... very useful feedback on extending analysis to other public goods ...

Great panel - touching on possibilities of the mooted 'reassurance force' for Ukraine ...

Opening up of Stockholm workshop on future of international military missions

Final slide of my IR course for this term ... the end of unipolarity

10/ Congress / Concert system directly inspired the League, which directly inspires the UN – so it is both analytically legit and worthwhile, I argue, looking at 19C episodes of multinational military expeditions authorised by multiple great powers to explore link between peace ops and multipolarity

9 / De facto peace ops & PKO existed BEFORE first 1956 PKO – e.g., UN missions in Kashmir, Greece, as well as Leticia and Saar ops under the League. The fascist helmets in the pic below are Mussolini’s troops deployed to Saarland in 1930s – fascists did peacekeeping too (another paper on this …)

7/ SO – IF unipolarity led to the peacekeeping boom, how do we analyse dynamics of peace ops in earlier eras, including eras where UN and blue helmets didn’t exist?

6/ We can be confident, I think, that the decline in peacekeeping ops since 2016 is more evidence that unipolarity is over (more on that below) – and perhaps that the ‘stabilisation’ era of peacekeeping was also evidence of unipolar decline (not directly discussed in the paper).