Author Archives: Victor McFarland

About Victor McFarland

is an assistant professor of history at the University of Missouri. He received his doctorate in history from Yale University and has served as a Miller Center Fellow at the University of Virginia and a Dickey Center Fellow at Dartmouth College. He studies the history of U.S. foreign relations, political economy, the Arab world, and the oil industry. His current book project focuses on the oil crisis of the 1970s.

The Paris Climate Agreement in Historical Perspective

December 15, 2015 by
3 comments
The COP21 accord signed on Saturday represents a landmark achievement in the fight against global climate change. The negotiations in Paris produced a binding commitment by 195 nations to restrict their greenhouse gas emissions. Despite years of effort, such a sweeping agreement had eluded negotiators until now. COP21, however, was not entirely without historical precedent. In addition to earlier, less successful attempts to limit greenhouse gas emissions like the Rio de Janeiro, Kyoto, and Copenhagen agreements, the talks in Paris also evoked older debates about Continue reading →

The New International Economic Order, Interdependence, and Globalization

March 18, 2015 by
No comments
The New International Economic Order (NIEO) was a failure as a political program. Its proposals called for a sweeping transformation of the global economy, but most of them never came close to being implemented. In fact, during the following decades, the world economy evolved not toward the NIEO vision of multilateral oversight and income redistribution but in the opposite direction, toward a more purely marketbased approach that has variously been called globalization, neoliberalism, market fundamentalism, or the “Washington Consensus.” Why, then, study the NIEO? Scholars Continue reading → Continue reading →