In an August 30 piece for BBC News, Shashank Joshi, a graduate student at Harvard University and associate fellow at a major U.K. think tank, argued that strong statements from American officials about Syrian president Assad's loss of legitimacy would help advance...
Today is a good day to mark the passing of a true injustice.
The website e-IR asked me to review how mainstream media have represented radical Islamist media in the past decade, and what this means for the spread of radical discourses more broadly. Here is my...
Political scientists love citations, or, more accurately, to be cited. Actually compiling citations is a tremendously tedious chore that political scientists leave to the very end of any paper, one...
I wasn't going to post this (again), but the thread below is starting to turn toward reminiscence; a cut-and-paste job seems easier than rewriting. On the morning of September 11, 2001, I drove my wife to the Nanuet train station. We said goodbye and she got on the train to begin her commute into Manhattan. I went home and took a shower.Sometime later that morning I went downstairs to the basement of our townhouse, which doubled as my office. I started working on one of my projects. I can't recall whether I was revising chapters of my dissertation or working on an article-length project....
Alcohol (Battlestar Galactica) from Anno Superstar on Vimeo.Though by right this post should be pure casual Friday nerd filler (as opposed to genuine literary commentary on representations of military affairs in science fiction), I feel compelled to point you to this highly academic and substantive essay by Jason T. Eberl and Erik D. Baldwin, "How to Be Happy After the End of the World" in which it is argued:"Fans of BSG are sometimes frustrated with the characters' actions and decisions. But would any of us do better if we were in their places? We'd like to think so, but would we really?...
I am going to try writing down pieces of advice that I give to students all the time, in the hopes that they might be useful for people who can't make it to my office hours."Spelling out your theoretical and methodological assumptions -- the contours of your conceptual equipment, so to speak -- is a vital part of doing good social science, because if I don't know what your assumptions are then I really can't fairly evaluate your results. In fact, if I don't know what your assumptions are, I probably have little choice but to apply my own standards, which may or may not be appropriate to your...
If you're interested in how the syllabus turned out, you can read it here.I must say that I am very much enjoying teaching the class so far. Thanks to everyone for their comments and suggestions.
We have gone almost a month without talking about zombies, and you all must be in need of a fix. Instead of thinking how various theories of international relations might expect us to cope with a zombie epidemic, I thought it might be fun to think about how leading public figures – elected officials, pundits, etc. – might respond to a zombie attack. This is in keeping with my general belief that we would see many different responses by individuals in the same structural circumstances, that foreign policy is more important than international relations.Incidentally, I just want you to know...
This post is a little impressionistic and attempts a few trans-Atlantic generalisations, but is probably still worth a punt.If Clausewitz was right that each period holds to its own theory of war, what do we see when we look in the mirror after a decade of the conflict against Islamist terror networks? In the US and UK at least, I'd suggest that the War on Terror was a reflection of the evolving liberal-market state.That is, a state that defines its security interests through an expansive liberalism, securing itself by exporting liberal institutions and values and investing its struggles...
Dick Cheney's memoir apparently verifies an interesting political point from George W. Bush's memoir. Last November, I noted that the former President claimed that Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) had approached him in 2006 prior to the congressional elections in order to urge withdrawal of some US troops from Iraq. This might save the Republican majority, argued the Majority Leader, even though McConnell was publicly taking the position that the US should remain in Iraq for vital security reasons. After the election, of course, Bush famously increased the US deployment in Iraq ("the surge").A...