I’m an associate professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University. I’m interested in all sorts of things, but am mostly focusing these days on two projects (while hoping to take up a third project on political theory again soon).
First, I’m working with Cosma Shalizi on a hopelessly ambitious project that aims to bring together political theory, network theory, cognitive psychology, machine learning and all sorts of other things to investigate the workings of institutions. One paper from this project, which sets out a cognitive account of how democracy can work better than markets and hierarchies in solving complex problems, is available here. We hope to turn this into a book. A second paper, which uses evolutionary models to rethink institutional change, and a third, which models problem solving across networked populations with heterogenous understandings of the problem, should be available soon.
Second, I’m writing a book with Abraham Newman on the internationalization of homeland security. This book applies arguments that we’ve been developing about how cross-national strategic interactions are increasingly important to domestic institutional change. An article which surveys recent work on the ‘new interdependence,’ as well as setting out our own ideas, came out in World Politics in Spring 2014.
My and Marty Finnemore’s piece, The End of Hypocrisy, appears in the Nov/Dec 2013 issue of Foreign Affairs. You can find an ungated copy here. My guide to good writing for undergraduate political science students is here.
I blog at Crooked Timber (general political argument, intellectual discussion, and completely non-intellectual discussion) and at The Monkey Cage (political science and its applications), which has moved to the Washington Post. My Twitter handle is @henryfarrell, and my Pinboard feed is henryfarrell. Contact me at myfirstname.mylastname@gmail.com.
I’m also co-chair (with Nick Lemann) of the Social Science Research Council’s Digital Culture Initiative, a faculty member of the MacArthur Foundation’s Research Network on Opening Governance, an affiliated scholar at Stanford University Law School’s Center for the Internet and Society, a faculty associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, associate editor of Perspectives on Politics and Research and Politics, and an international correspondent for Stato e Mercato.