Cross posted at Discord and Elaboration:Last week I (sort of) complained about the recent move by the US to allow Iran to begin the membership ascension process to the WTO in exchange for a further (not permanent) freeze on uranium enrichment until August, when...
French voters rejected the European Constitution yesterday in a referendum by a pretty decisive margin: 55% opposed, 45% in favor. Pollsters had been predicting this outcome for a while, so the...
Some time ago I joined an evolutionary-psychology listserv. Some international-relations scholars have started to draw on evolutionary psychology, and I thought reading the listserv might be one way...
Because you, the readers, want to know -- or at least because we, the writers, think that you, the readers, want to know. (I'm fascinated by the fact that a name and a personal biography improve the...
There were two sets of very interesting comments on my recent post on hegemony. Bill Petti questions whether US hegemony only has another few decades left in its lifespan. At the most basic level, Bill is right. I definitely overstated the case. At the same time, Bill presents far too optimistic a picture of the prospects for medium-term American primacy.Bill argues that hegemonic decline is driven by one of four processes: "imperial overstretch, economic decline, and either purposeful retrenchment (i.e. Britain) or internal collapse (i.e. the Soviet Union)."Let's start with the first...
The Duck of Minerva is now a collaborative endeavor. Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, an assistant professor at American University, and William Petti, a doctoral student in international relations at the University of Pennsylvania, have agreed to join the staff.They will be introducing themselves shortly.
The life of an academic is all about balancing the scales. The pay isn't so hot, but the hours are good. Grading is a pain, but they give you money to read stuff. And so on.But one thing that really does unequivocally suck about being an academic, at least in political science, is the constant rejection - or the existential threat of rejection. Russell Arben Fox captures this feature of academic life quite well (although I wish he didn't have the need to):April is the Cruelest Month... especially for academics, and more particularly those who act the part of such. April is when the last,...
How many recent developments in international politics can be attributed to US hegemony as opposed to structural shifts in the international economy, technology, or other factors that might be considered at least partially autonomous from American primacy? The answer to this question matters a great deal, because no one expects US primacy to last much more than a few additional decades.1 Dan Drezner weighs in on the question in his review of a recent article by Gregg Easterbook. Easterbrook reports the relatively well-known (at least among international-relations scholars) finding that...
I stumbled across Orson Scott Card's review of Star Wars whilst reading Lawyers, Guns and Money, which itself links to the article via Lance Mannion. There's been some disappointment over the tenor and quality of Card's article, but this is what jumped out at me:As a religion, the Force is just the sort of thing you’d expect a liberal-minded teenage kid to invent. There’s no God and there are no rules other than a vague insistence on unselfishness and oath-keeping. Power comes from the sum of all life in the universe, and it is manichaean, not Christian — evil is simply another way of using...
In response to Time Burke's "Rampant Geekery: Star Wars Thoughts [SPOILERS]", I made a comment about what I called "nerd hermeneutics": the analysis of the text and media of speculative worlds, such as Star Wars and Star Trek, as if they were complete, self-contained systems. In a followup, Tim expands masterfully on this concept. He talks about it as "ways in which a fiction like Star Wars invites a particular kind of reader to make it into more than it is, to fill in its gaps, invent coherencies, see themes that are only barely there."Reading my comment with the benefit of, well, actually...
Even though nobody reads this blog, I'm going to pretend that this isn't the case. Thus, a request for help.One of my side projects is am edited volume on Harry Potter and international relations. The current opening paragraph reads as follows: This volume is about Harry Potter and world politics. This may seem like an odd topic. What, one might ask, can works of children’s fantasy possibly teach us about war, peace, intervention, international trade, transnational movements, and other concerns that form the core of the study of international politics? The answer is that the Harry Potter...
I have this long post in draft form about U.S. foreign policy and Central Asia, but I'll probably never finish it before it gets stale (not least because I have an edited volume to finish). There is, however, a very interesting discussion going on over at Crooked Timber about academia, ideas, and progress. You can read the details yourself. I only have a few comments:1. The goal of cumulative knowledge in the social and natural sciences is all well and good. The fact is, however, that academics should strive to cite and reference prior work that is relevant to our own because our ideas are...