This is none too pithy, but tonight (this morning?) I’m just going to toss up a whole stream of ideas that have been percolating since the first BioNote discussion and took shape while I was attending the ISA conference in San Francisco. They relate to a very...
In response to our discussion about how explicitly IR scholars should reveal the personal influences on their work Dan Drezner points out that IR scholars do tend to have (and take) somewhat more...
As Duncan Black would say, "document the atrocities."My pick o' the conference:Hans J. Morgenthau and the Politics Among Nations – 60 Years Later WA19 Wednesday 8:30 - 10:15 AM Chair(s):Michael...
Peter Howard emails me a link to the latest coverage of the threat from Svalbard.I didn't have a chance to watch the report, but I assume it comprises another whitewash of the critical danger posed...
With all of the important developments in world politics in need ripe for thoughtful self-important analysis at the Duck, why am I posting another review of Harry Potter and International Relations? Because I can.Frank A. Stengel in Internationale Politik und Gesellschaft: The study of popular culture is slowly gaining ground within the discipline of International Relations. Not only are more and more teachers discovering movies, music, and so on, as educational tools, but ever more researchers are systemically examining how pop culture influences, and is influenced by, international...
I quite liked an article I read in International Studies Review a couple of years back, a conversation between Ersel Aydinli and James Rosenau, published under the heading "Courage vs. Caution: A Dialogue on Entering and Prospering in IR." One of the most thoughtful exchanges in the "Dialogue" has to do with academic norms regarding full disclosure of our identities as scholars / persons. Rosenau argues, defending a "commitment to explicitness" exemplified in his concluding Distant Proximities chapter, that scholars should situate themselves in the world they are writing about so as to allow...
The confluence this week of the Eliot Spitzer resignation and yet another round of discussions about the Barack Obama-Tony Rezko connection led me -- like, I'm sure, many of you -- to wonder a bit about the political consequences of the fact that "personal integrity" seems to have become the most important commodity that a whole slew of U.S. pundits and even large swaths of the U.S. electorate looks for in a candidate for public office. Besides the usual concerns, such as the fact that I can't for the life of me understand why participation in shady real estate deals or a habit of visiting...
A DC-based NGO is promulgating a novel idea: that states should compensate civilians that they legally harm during combat operations. The Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict(CIVIC) has launched a "You Harm You Help" campaign. Having succeeded in convincing the US Government to create a trust fund for victims of collateral damage in Afghanistan and Iraq, the organization is now trying to figure out how to turn this practice into a global norm. The idea is important because the existing laws of war don't require governments to compensate war victims.Governments are often required to pay...
For those of you who may have found my discussion of the argument befuddling, I give you a less technical version below the fold.My argument begins with the most banal of claims: we cannot understand the political impact of the Protestant Reformations without reference to the institutional structures and dynamics of early modern European states. How, my readers might ask, could it be otherwise? Some of the most influential international-relations literature on international change in early modern Europe, I answer, pays very little attention to patterns of resistance and rule. Scholars too...
Brad reads my announcement of manuscript delivery, and raises a few important questions:1. Do you really want to write "Franche-Compté" rather than "Franche-Comté"?2. Do you really want to leave blurb-readers (and us!) hanging as to what your theory of state formation and the Wars of the Reformation actually is?3. Jan de Vries and I, after class last Wednesday, were discussing why it was that transoceanic trade seems to have done something to strengthen the forces of tolerance, economic liberty, and representative government in the United Provinces and the United Kingdom, and to have done a...
Ellie Tzortzi of Reuters:The coalition government of Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica was formally dissolved on Monday, opening the way for an early parliamentary election.The decision was taken at a brief cabinet session following Kostunica's announcement on Saturday that the government could not continue in office owing to deep disunity over defending Kosovo versus pursuing a place in the European Union."The government did not have a united and common policy any more," a statement said, "and this kept it from performing its basic constitutional function, to define and lead...
I didn't think it was possible, but if the Washington Post's summary of Douglas Feith's manuscript is accurate, Feith's attempt to rehabilitate his image is only likely to make him look worse.The idea to which Feith appears most attached, and to which he repeatedly returns in the book, is the formation of an Iraqi Interim Authority. Feith's office drew up a plan for the body -- to be made up of U.S.-appointed Iraqis who would share some decision-making with U.S. occupation forces -- in the months before the invasion. But while he says that Bush approved it, he charges that Bremer refused to...