Given the low salaries many of us start out at, we probably overly identify with the crisis contained within this trailer (no significant spoilers):
Friday Nerd Blogging: Lost in Furniture
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Year: 2013
The International Relations Enlightenment and the Ends of International Relations Theory
From its very inception IR was a substantive normative and political project.
Monday Linkage
The Navy Yard in DC came under fire this morning. Developing. 9/11 Anniversary commentary of note: Tom Junod on the sanitization of disaster footage. Dan Nexon's original thoughts on this are always...
Memory Loss as Imperial Effect
That was the apex of Dependency Theory in the US, I am betting. It wasn’t long before it was shelved in the curio cabinet. Dependency Theory had died from neglect, not from critique.
More Year: 2013 Posts
Obama, Drones, and the Matter of Definitions
Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Tobias T. Gibson, an associate professor of political science and security studies at Westminster College in Fulton, Mo. In the buildup to President Obama’s speech at National Defense University on May 23, the administration suggested that the speech would clarify US policy on the use of drones in targeted killing. Although the president took pains to describe the limitations set forth by his administration, the speech provided little genuine clarity. The working definitions of three very important words play a key role in undermining the putative...
(Peer/Non) Review
I understand that there's been some recent blog-chatter on one of my favorite hobbyhorses, peer review in Political Science and International Relations. John Sides gets all 'ruh roh' because of an decades-old old, but scary, experiment that shows pretty much what every other study of peer-review shows: Then, perhaps coincidentally, Steve Walt writes a longish post on "academic rigor" and peer review. Walt's sorta right and sorta wrong, so I must write something of my own,* despite the guarantee of repetition. What does Walt get right? Third, peer review is probably overvalued because...
Call for Abstracts: Millennium Conference, 19-20 October, 2013
Millennium. Journal of International Studies Annual Conference "Rethinking the Standard(s) of Civilisation(s) in International Relations" 19-20 October 2013 London School of Economics and Political Science Deadline for abstracts: 7 June, 2013 The theme of this year's conference will focus on the standard(s) of civilisation(s) in International Relations. In recent years, there has been a renewed scholarly interest in the concept of 'the standard of civilisation' in examining international norms, practices and policies entrenched in world politics, including international law, human rights,...
Thursday Dinklage
If you are like me, you are pining for your next installment of Game of Thrones (and the Memorial Day week off was cruel, though not as cruel as the torment we have seen of late). In the meantime, I give you your weekly dose of Thursday Morning Dinklage. Top stories this week: Steve Walt puts the flawed but necessary peer review process in perspective Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb's letter to oft-dead Mokhtar Belmokhtar for his unwillingness to be a good team player has been translated and is a classic (I sense a new Sahel version of The Office) Belmokhtar's group pulls off some new...
Wednesday Addams Linkage
A handful of links today, but with content. Dan Drezner discusses China, Thucydides, and the limit of metaphor. It strikes me that Dan's buried the lede here. The question isn't whether Thucydides is applicable to the Sino-American relationship, or whether Tuchman is better, but rather why even Chinese IR professors have adopted the tropes of the Western professoriate. After all, China has its very own history from which to draw analogies, as smart scholars like Victoria Tin-bor Hui and David Kang have reminded Western audiences. The history of the Warring States period seems at least as...
GIGA Comparative Area Studies Award
Some of our readers might be interested in this. Comes with a €2,500 prize. The GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies, Hamburg, has established itself as a centre of academic and research excellence in Comparative Area Studies (CAS) with a special focus on politics, international relations and economics. The GIGA has decided to establish an award for Best Article in the Field of CAS. The first awards ceremony will take place on 9–10 April 2014 during the international CAS conference “Adapting Institutions: A Comparative Area Studies Perspective”, one of the main activities...
The Science of Teacher Evaluation Manipulation
Hopefully, another semester has come to a close for you and you’re catching up on some much needed research/sleep. After I’ve doled out grades for my students, I usually get a nice big stack of evaluations of my teaching abilities, filled out by those very same students who squeaked by with a “C-“in my class. At my previous university, it was the ONLY way my teaching was evaluated; for better or worse, no senior faculty or peers ever evaluated my teaching content, style, or skills in the classroom. A whopping 40% of my annual evaluation came from what my students recorded on bubble-sheets...
Tiwesdæg: the Left-hand of Linkage
The Hong Kong Duck is back! Not much point in having the "best" military R&D in the world if a potential rival can steal your most important designs. A Law of the Sea symposium (and also) at Opinio Juris on "search and rescue operations." LFC on Kennan's opposition to the Vietnam War. Making the most out of Google dirigibles over Africa. Anti-vaccine themes in popular discourse. Jocelyn Cesari looks at France's "peculiar same-sex marriage debate"; Zack Ford summarizes recent anti-gay violence at "demonstrations in Ukraine, Russia, and France." Cranky sociologist reviews left-wing...