As it turns out, there are a group of scholars working to bridge this divide. Check out the Bridging the Gap Project. The project has programs for new and not-so-new scholars in the US and abroad. This seems to be exactly what we need.  Take a look and consider...
I got bogged down with NK for awhile, so I missed a chance to comment on the RNC and the US election more generally. I have some thoughts after the break, but a Democrat friend of mine wrote the...
Data is not good government. Even when it wears a green eyeshade.The Wonkblog view of the world presumes that social problems should be met with policy solutions, and that the best way to analyze...
This Bear is Ready for Duck SeasonPhoto: Dan NexonMajor strike in India to protest liberalization. William Burr: Presidential Decision Directive 59 and nuclear warfighting under Carter.James Joyner...
 This is what I'm talking about:City University London's Centre for Information Leadership is hosting this free symposium to bring together academics and practitioners from across industry to tackle the challenges posed by "big data" - the growing amount of information that needs to be stored, searched, analysed and visualised in the digital age.The event aims to begin a dialogue across traditionally-siloed sectors, reflecting the fact that a wide range of organisations and individuals are struggling to cope with the explosion of data brought about by new technologies - from smart meters in...
Timothy Peterson and Leah Graham recently published a study in the Journal of Conflict Resolution showing that, after you control for the democratic peace, similarities in human rights performance have an important effect on any two countries' likelihood to go to war. The interesting caveat is that this finding holds true for states that abuse their citizens as well as those that don't:Although mutual norms of domestic non-violence are more pacifying than mutual disregard thereof, the authors argue that a wide disparity in norms is more aggravating than shared norms... that norm asymmetry is...
[This is a cross-posting from Dart-Throwing Chimp.] I've just finished reading John Lewis Gaddis's terrific biography of George Frost Kennan, a towering figure in American foreign policy after World War II whom Henry Kissinger described as "one of the most important, complex, moving, challenging and exasperating American public servants." Apart from recommending to the book, which I do without hesitation to anyone with an interest in world affairs, I wanted to talk about how Gaddis' distillation of Kennan's ideas helped me clarify some of my own thinking on the conduct of foreign...
In the Matrix, it's trivial to specify the underlyingdata-generating process. It involves kung fu. Given PTJ's post, I wanted to clarify two points from my original post on Big Data and the ensuing comment thread.I use quantitative methods in my own work. I've invested a lot of time and a lot of money in learning statistics. I like statistics! I think that the development of statistical techniques for specifying and disciplining our analytic approach to uncertainty is the most important development in social science of the past 100 years. My objection in the comments thread, then, was not to...
[This post was written by PTJ]One of the slightly disconcerting experiences from my week in Vienna teaching an intensive philosophy of science course for the European Consortium on Political Research involved coming out of the bubble of dialogues with Wittgenstein, Popper, Searle, Weber, etc. into the unfortunate everyday actuality of contemporary social-scientific practices of inquiry. In the philosophical literature, an appreciably and admirably broad diversity reigns, despite the best efforts of partisans to tie up all of the pieces of the philosophy of science into a single and univocal...
Our social science faculty association organized a trip to Vietnam last week. It was pretty fascinating. It was my first trip, and I don’t speak the language, so obviously I am qualified to generalize wildly about it now. As Gabriel Almond once quipped, ‘you should never generalize about a country until you’ve at least flown over it. So guess I meet that test at least. Here are some anecdotal, political science-y impressions:1. Communist hagiography really freaks me out. I have now been to the ‘holy-site’ tombs of Lenin, Mao, and Ho Chi Minh, and they are some of the most bizarre human...
I'm going to delve clumsily into IR Theory here, so I'd be grateful to get some feedback on the question of the 'Realist' minimum.In a fascinating post recently on US-China relations, Stephen Walt wrote:"First, as a good realist, I think that the basic state of Sino-American relations will be driven more by balances of power and configurations of interest than by the personalities of individual leaders. As I've noted before, if China continues to grow more powerful, Bejing and Washington will view each other with an increasingly wary eye and are likely to find more issues about which to...
Cello/sci-fi/heavy-metal nerds, all my favorites rolled into one.