The ISA-NE leadership hopes to make a decision by 1200 EDT concerning the status of the conference. While the DC area looks like it should be navigable by Thursday, we don't have good information about Baltimore or about what the state of east-coast travel will be...
Rob Farley reminds us that not every dictator is the fault of US foreign policy. Brad Delong says 'less anniversary attention for the Cuban Missile Crisis, more for Stalingrad.' Dan Murphy writes...
via Richard Moyes of Article36.org: "We are calling on all autonomous robots to establish a new subroutine that would prohibit the sustenance and accommodation of killer humans", said campaign...
Michael Krepon argues that Asian nuclear competition takes place under different rules than did the US-Soviet rivalry. The security situation in Darfour is "deteriorating" according to a UN...
Greetings, Duck Followers. I’m Amanda – assistant professor at Mizzou, avid hiker, crazy sci-fi romance novel reader, and pretty competent mother. I’m excited to be a new “duckling” on the block. On the eve of the next US presidential debate, I’ll go out on a limb and guess that the dire human rights situation in Syria will be mentioned. I’ll also bet that neither candidate will say definitively that a humanitarian military intervention is needed. But, in line with my research and that of my colleagues, some forms of military intervention – especially intervention with a stated...
This is of interest only to international-relations theorists and fellow travelers. A long-standing claims about hegemonic orders is that they are normative ones: that a dominant power uses a wide variety of power resources to create a set of international rules and regimes conducive to its ideological and material interests. After World War II the United States worked actively to promote norms and institutions consistent with a broadly "liberal internationalist" environment, albeit ones refracted through the prism of Cold War competition. After the Cold War the United States enlarged the...
Along with the face-lift come some new faces to the Duck. Well, new names anyway. We recruited this year based on the desire to increase diversity on the blog, particularly in methodology and area expertise; and also to cover some staple topics while one or more permanent contributors (myself included) cut back for a time to finish book projects and deal with other commitments. Please welcome the following guest bloggers to our site for the following academic year. Phil Arena is Assistant Professor of Political Science at SUNY Buffalo. He specializes in international conflict, focusing...
Analysis of the Chinese 052D Luyang III-class destroyer. David Schorr's April "resolve fairy" post that almost certainly influenced my account of the Romney-Ryan doctrine. Will Romney escalate tensions with China? More on the Iranian-supplied Hezbollah drone downed by Israel. Against Pakistani "sovereignty" objections to US operations. Ukraine supposedly weaponizes dolphins. Jay compares Georgia and Venezuela. Phil Arena discusses "formal theory and policy relevance." Modelski argues that long-cycle theory should be applied to international regimes. Problems with plagiarism-detection...
The initial reaction from Facebook and from my Realist friends reveals a certain amount of scorn for the Nobel Peace Prize announcement this morning. The EU today is an easy parody and I guess the response is to be expected. Nonetheless, I appreciate Erik Voeten’s post that Dan linked below and share his bottom line that this is a decent decision. I would just add a couple of additional points. First, I agree that if we evaluate or judge the EU from the reference of 2012 or the most recent past, this decision looks a bit bizarre. But, if we situate it in the broader historical context...
As I've mentioned before, one of the projects that I'm working on now is a book provisionally entitled "The Politics of the Hunger Games." PM and I are overdue in submitting a full proposal to the press. In an earlier post I sketched out some provisional chapter titles. Here I provide a more complete list and a synopsis of the final chapter. This is definitely a "crowdsourcing" post, so comments are appreciated. Details and spoilers below the fold. Introduction Part I: The World of the Hunger Games Capitol Rule: Panem as Empire Capitol Punishment: is Panem a Totalitarian State? Panem and...
I scored the Romney-Obama debate as a tactical win for Romney. As of now, it looks more like a strategic one. The lesson for me, I think, is not to assess the political ramifications of debates. So in this post, I'll simply stick to reflecting on the foreign-policy component of the debate, which turned out to be much more prominent than most of us expected. The bottom line is that, with the exception of the earlier Libya exchange, Biden owned Ryan. Indeed, the debate continued to underscore the vacuousness of much of the Romney campaign's "political" critique of Obama foreign policy. I...
Erik Voeten is pleased: The Realist argument about the importance of the U.S. security umbrella is probably correct. Yet, the dire predictions regarding the future of European integration have yet to materialize. Indeed, the EU sped up its integration considerably with the end of the Cold War; creating deeper institutions and adding fifteen new member states. The integration of the Eastern European former socialist states has not gone without difficulties. Yet, given the scale of the problem, I would argue that it has gone a lot better than it plausible would have without the EU. The promise...