Political science bores me to tears. If economics is the ‘dismal science’, then the English language has probably yet to come up with a phrase pithy enough to capture the small-mindedness of a discipline that can turn the most interesting of events into the dullest of journals articles and conference papers. Revolutions, social movements and ground-breaking ideas are surrendered to methodological fetishism that often makes the method more significant than the issue under study. Most branches of international relations are little better. Bizarrely, large swathes of the discipline are still lodged in the 1950s and carry forth a firm belief in state sovereignty despite ample evidence that the world has moved on