James Scott Linville passes along Anuradha Roy's comments on the protests engulfing India and the death of the 23-year old victim whose brutal rape galvanized them (via 3QD). Reactions to the Japanese election as covered by the Rising Powers Initiative blog. You know,...
This is awesome.
The URI administration has issued a new statement: What to make of this? On the one hand, I don't think anybody will buy the claim that (1) Erik is at fault for "not making clear that he was...
Now that your holiday shopping is (hopefully) all done, relax, and enjoy these thoughts on our global capitalist society... Development/capitalism and its discontents... Ever the drum-major for...
This is a guest post by Jarrod Hayes. Jarrod is Assistant Professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs. He received his PhD in Politics and International Relations from the University of Southern California in 2009. From 2009 to 2010, he was the ConocoPhillips Assistant Professor of International Relations at the University of Oklahoma, a joint appointment between the Department of Political Science and the School of International and Area Studies. Last week, my wife and I were hiking with a local day hiking group in Hong Kong. We were discussing Hong Kong’s pollution and the...
Podcast No. 16 will be available by midweek. I left the power cable for the external hard drive on which all of my podcasting files are stored in my office.... Doh!
Good morning... here's your Monday roundup... US & Europe The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) found that Macedonian officials handed an (innocent) German citizen over to American officials who sodomized and tortured him in the presence of Macedonian officials and on Macedonian soil.  Something to ponder as you watch Zero Dark Thirty. Central/South Asia Afghanistan: The AAN Network's S. Reza Kazemi discusses whether threats of a spillover of armed conflict into Central Asia are being exaggerated by Afghanistan's northern neighbors. Ajai Shukla's Broadsword Blog provides an excellent...
Via Twitter, Elke Larsen explains that France is "The Other Pacific Power." CSIS report on the Sino-Vietnamese maritime dispute: "Trouble Outside the Gulf of Tonkin" (via Taylor Fravel). Phil Davis provides a guide for gaming google scholar. Perhaps one day the counting citations game will collapse under its own weight? William M. Briggs unpacks what regression equations actually mean, and why so many textbooks get them wrong. Via Chris Blattman. Chris Blatmman also passes along Marcella Alsen's cool paper on the TseTse fly and African development. She gave a terrific talk on this at...
I recorded an interview with Rob Farley yesterday on academic blogging and the academic blogsphere. I had planned to put it up this evening but, like, I suspect, a lot of Americans, I've been a bit distracted for the last few hours. The upshot is that I haven't completed post-production and the podcast will likely not be available until tomorrow. I know it won't be long before we get into some kind of discussion about the Atlantic community's relative indifference to deaths outside of its borders. For now, let's just leave it at this: certain facts of media coverage, the cognitive basis of...
 Friday is here. SEMESTER IS OVER. Fresh snow on the Vermont slopes. Three very good things. I'm surprising my wife with this news -- I've already lined up the kids for summer camp. More fodder on Nixon and Kissinger's support for a corrupt Shah. Kind of where we are in Syria.  Not good. I guess this is pretty obvious. Pete Muller has his own short take on events in Cairo. Everything we need to know this month about U.S.-South Korean relations. Although, the the analysis we really want seems to be missing. If you missed the Geminds last night -- spectacular by the way -- there should be...
I don't want to say too much about the Rathbun-Arena smackdown (smackduck?) taking place but I will say this: We often rely on maps that are not "true." The Mercator projection is "wrong" if our criterion is "showing countries according to their relative size" but "useful" if our criterion is "helping to plot sea voyages." Moreover, we sometimes explicitly distort maps to make them more useful: As Wikipedia notes, the Tube map is considered a huge advance on earlier maps despite being flatly wrong about distance, train routes, and everything else. When we consider theories, it may be that...
Many of you seem to have read my earlier post knocking the use of assumptions in theory-building, particularly rationalism, and Phil Arena's defense of it. My earlier post was a little over the top and insulting, which led him to take umbrage. I called him a dick; he called me a dick. We were both right, although I guess I started it. When we are thinking about who to ask in as guest contributors, my main criteria was theoretical and epistemological diversity. Then I pulled this. Now we are going to hug it out. Come here, buddy. Give me some sugar. Wait, wait.... No tongue. You are still...