Duck of Minerva is pleased to announce the second annual Online Achievement in International Studies (OAIS) Blogging Awards -- better known as the Duckie Awards -- and the second annual International Studies Blogging Reception at ISA in Toronto. We are asking Duck...
Registration is now open for the two ISA Working Groups scheduled for ISA Toronto. I am coordinating one of them with my colleague Kavita Khory on Global Trends in War, Conflict and Political...
As I’m sure all astute Duck readers are aware, today marks a critical day in the US House and Senate – if no deal is struck today on a spending bill, the US government will shut down at one minute...
Gunmen killed scores of students in their sleep at Yobe State College of Agriculture in Nigeria early Sunday morning. via Adam Jones on FB, it is interesting to note this massacre was reportedly...
Collection and promulgation of links today was interrupted by my daughter's minor sports injury. For all ten of you who care: my apologies. Go read Cherly Rofer's Edward Snowden timeline. Or about a nearby star "crowded with super-Earths." Or focus on today's gutting of the Voting Rights Act. Or about the game that's stolen my partner. Or something. Just so long as you change your profile image to an equality sign. Cause that will totally impact tomorrow's decisions. That's all, folks.
In case you are interested in expanding our knowledge of the use/misuse of teacher evaluations, Lisa Martin of Wisconsin-Madison has a short survey that is worth taking: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/KDWNCXS Results may make it into what looks like a very exciting APSA panel on "Minding the Gender Gap in Political Science."
Robert’s review of The American Culture of War yesterday was both extremely funny and informative. It also mentioned a problem I’ve seen in a lot of the civil-military relations literature: too much over-identification with a political leaning or ideology. This area of scholarship reminds me sometimes of Jack Nicholson in “A Few Good Men” – if I’m walking around the annual conference of the Inter-University Seminar at Armed Forces and Society without a uniform on, I’m immediately put in a category by some scholars. That’s unfortunate – understanding the determinants of civil-military...
As the Great Slump continues to grind down Western twenty-somethings, some welcome news: America's funemployment rate is slowing. Funemployment, as the Los Angeles Times put it, is the trend by which twenty- and thirty-somethings, finding themselves cast aside from their temporary and entry-level jobs, turn instead toward self-improvement. Of course, this information might be unwelcome: perhaps Generation Y is merely discovering that there's nothing fun about unemployment. That turn toward bitterness might explain the rising popularity of Old Economy Steve. ' This is a bug fix.
“Interpretive and Relational Research Methodologies” A One-Day Graduate Student Workshop Sponsored by the International Studies Association-Northeast Region 9 November, 2013 • Providence, Rhode Island International Studies has always been interdisciplinary, with scholars drawing on a variety of qualitative and quantitative techniques of data collection and data analysis as they seek to produce knowledge about global politics. Recent debates about epistemology and ontology have advanced the methodological openness of the field, albeit mainly at a meta-theoretical level. And while interest in...
I was asked by a participating member of the H-Diplo/ISSF network to review The American Culture of War. Here is the original link to my review, but it’s off in some far corner of the internet, so I thought I’d repost it here. In brief, I found the book a pretty disturbing rehearsal of right-wing tropes about the military in a democracy, especially from an academic, and there’s no way I’d ever use it with undergrads as Routledge suggests. The underlying moral driver is the ‘chicken hawk’ principle – that those without military experience are not morally qualified to lead DoD and should...
Hey. Here's your linkage... Data Mining No, I don't care where Snowden is going next... but I am happy to see that Hong Kong used the opportunity to request clarification about US hacking of their computer systems. (h/t E. Webb) Drones Paradoxically, there's something about James Bridle's outline of a reaper drone on the steps of the Corcoran Gallery that makes the idea of drones more tangible and murderous. Of course, the drone pilots actually spend much of their time being bored. Luckily, Jerry Falwell's Liberty University is willing to supply thousands of "Christ-centered aviators" to...
The "debate on missile defense" leaves Robert Farley feeling very, very tired. Sean Kay wants the US to go cold turkey on European troop deployments. Heh. Heh. "Snowden Crash." Heh. "The Strangelove Caucus." Cute. And also: Virtual transitions: The World SF Blog ends, The Smoked-Filled Room celebrates one year of correctly hyphenating a compound-adjective.