Riding the Shi: From Infection Barriers to the Microbial City

The "UFO Taboo" Is What IR Theorists Make of It: "Sovereignty and the UFO" in Citational Perspective

In 2008, Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall published an article titled "Sovereignty and the UFO," which demonstrated how a UFO taboo in international relations theory upheld an anthropocentric model of sovereignty. At a distance of a decade and a half, this review evaluates the validity of the claim that a UFO taboo exists in international relations, and explores the citational practices that influence the prestige economy of the field. The article employs a methodology of interpretive scientometrics informed by methodological debates in political science and international, as well as theoretical debates in actor-network theory. After testing the claim of the UFO taboo in a comparative perspective, the article investigates the strategies of association (weak and strong) present in the citations of "Sovereignty and the UFO." In addition to a revaluation of core claims in an often-read but less-often-cited article in international relations theory, this article provides important insights into how citation works in the discipline of international relations.

Is Covid-19 a dread risk? The death toll of the pandemic year 2020 in long-term and transnational perspective

"Dread risks" are threats that can have catastrophic consequences. To analyse this issue we use excess mortality and corresponding life years lost as simple measures of the severity of pandemic events. As such, they are more robust than figures from models and testing procedures that usually inform public responses. We analyse data from OECD countries that are already fully available for the whole of 2020. To assess the severity of the pandemic, we compare with historical demographic events since 1880. Results show that reports of high excess mortality during peak periods and local outbreaks should not be taken as representative. Six countries saw a somewhat more increased percentage of life years lost (over 7%), nine countries show mild figures (0-7%), while seven countries had life year gains of up to 7%. So, by historical standards, Covid-19 is worse than regular flu, but a far cry from the Spanish Flu, which has become the predominant frame of reference for the current pandemic. Even though the demographic impact is modest, psychological aspects of the pandemic can still lead to transformative futures, as the reactions of East Asian societies to SARS I in 2003 showed.