If you haven't seen it, I did a (text) interview with SAGE about academic blogging and the awards. This was the source of my sense of déjà vu during my discussion with Rob Farley: some of the points overlap. Regardless, time is growing short. Here's where things...
Hi everyone. I haven’t been around much lately as I’ve been furiously writing a book. But it is almost done and I’m feeling reflective. Have you missed me? I’ve missed you. What’s that you say? Why...
"This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." Â So spoke Winston Churchill, after the Allied victory in the Second Battle of El...
We have two exciting developments to report concerning guest bloggers at the Duck. First, Adrienne LeBas'  From Protest to Parties: Party-Building and Democratization in Africa (Oxford University...
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...
Update: the Duck has moslty migrated (and that sentence makes sense in a non-technical context! Score!). Comment migration is in process, so probably not a good time for a magnum opus response. The existing RSS feed should work, so no need to change that. Vikash designed our new banner. The template is likely to shift some over the next week or so. Let us know about missing functionality, aestehic issues, and other stuff. Obviously, FB, Twitter, etc. integration is missing but will be around soon. Update 2: Apparently the template is being played with. So disregard relevant earlier comments....
Featuring Janice Bially Mattern. From 2012.
Georgetown University's debate coach comments (video) on the first presidential debate of 2012. PM's not the only one to respond to John Quiggin's post on the US Navy; Robert Farley also has a lot to say. Jeremy Keenan provides an overview of the Mali civil war at allAfrica. The Syrian civil war continues. Michael Krepon revisits Robert Jervis' The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution.Ryan Evans: "All Politics and Civil War is Local: Helmand's Micro-Conflicts."Dave Schuler riffs on Walter Russel Mead's analysis of Mitt Romney's debate performance: "Tacking Toward the Jacksonians."Daniel Little...
Political scientists like to complain about how little they are paid, which tends to be irritating to any number of other groups, most notably anyone who has a job other than that of a political scientist and has to be into the office say, before noon. Part of the reason that political scientists are so poorly compensated for their great contribution to humankind is that they are only rewarded when others from outside their organization value their work. This is because political scientists most like what other political scientists like. Professor Cumubbins has 10,000 citations this year and...
Acting was a big part of Battleship. At Crooked Timber, John Quiggin writes a post that seeks to sink a thousand ships: The trillions of dollars that have been spent on building, maintaining and scrapping fleets since 1945 has yielded almost zero benefits to the nations that have spent this money, in the belief that all respectable countries should have a navy. China’s carrier is an extreme example. About the best that can be said is that a zero benefit-cost ratio is substantially better than that for military expenditure in general. Quiggin's smart, but I'm surprised he overlooks the...