The Pop 5 is a new 'test' series of posts touching on events in pop culture and linking them back (briefly, hopefully, and sometimes loosely) to IR and politics. The posts are meant to be LIGHT, but also to take seriously the influence of popular culture on how we...
Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Christian Reus-Smit. It is the 17th installment in our "End of IR Theory" companion symposium for the special issue of the European Journal of International...
It's late Friday afternoon -- here are a few things worth reading: Betcy Jose asks, with all of the attention on chemical weapons, why does it matter how people die in conflict? Sohail Hashmi and I...
Over at the Woodrow Wilson Center's New Security Beat, I have a new post about a recent Science article by several economists on the connections between climate change and conflict. That article,...
This weekend marks the debut of the next Star Trek movie: So Dark, Oh So Dark 2. To mark the occasion: Two years to go!
Syttende mai! Remembering Kenneth Waltz Erica Chenoweth and Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham put together a special issue of the Journal of Peace Research on nonviolence. (Free access through July 31). A New Deal for Fragile States: spoiler alert -- national leadership and ownership of agendas are key. In other IRS news -- don't F@#$ with adjuncts... 3-d printable drones in our future? Meanwhile, back in Syria: Could things get any worse? Michael Walzer sees dithering in Syria as an entirely rational response. Is the town of Qusayr next? Jon Lee Anderson on videos of atrocities in war. and.......
With the semester coming to an end, time to hit the Internets and start blogging more regularly. I've been meaning to write one for months about the poaching crisis. It's coming. In the meantime, here is yet another story on the corrosive effects on governance by Sudanese elephant poachers in the Central African Republic. Elsewhere, it's not been a good week for the Obama Administration but good news for team O, the media agree that the Benghazi mess has been overblown: David Brooks on the scapegoating of State Department hand Victoria Neuland Jeffrey Goldberg concurs that Susan Rice was not...
Daryl Morini, an IR PhD candidate at the University of Queensland whom I know, has put together an interesting global survey for undergraduate and graduate students of international relations. It looks pretty thorough and might make a pretty interesting student couter-point to TRIP. Eventually the goal is an article on our students’ attitudes toward the discipline; here is the full write-up of the project at e-IR. So far as I know, nothing like this has been done before (please comment if that is incorrect), so this strikes me as the interesting sort of student work we should support....
In between making organic cupcakes for my daughters’ school, completing a grant application, tending my organic vegetables, and finishing an R&R for a journal, I came across this little gem of a working paper (thanks to Freakonomics Blog).[1] This new research shows the following: "Couples where the wife earns more than the husband are less satisfied with their marriage and are more likely to divorce. Finally, based on time use surveys, the gender gap in non-market work is larger if the wife earns more than the husband" (abstract). So, in a nutshell, women who earn more than their...
Via a Facebook friend, an analysis of the sound and fury surrounding MOOCs by Aaron Bady: Where this urgency comes from, however, might be less important than what it does to our sense of temporality, how experience and talk about the way we we are, right now, in “the MOOC moment.” In the MOOC moment, it seems to me, it’s already too late, always already too late. The world not only will change, but it has changed. In this sense, it’s isn’t simply that “MOOCs are the future,” or online education ischanging how we teach,” in the present tense. Those kinds of platitudes are chokingly [sic]...
The International Ethics section of the International Studies Association announces its annual book award competition for 2014. The award is given every year at the International Ethics section business meeting at the ISA Convention. Next year, the convention is in Toronto, March 26-29. The prize will be an award of $200 along with a plaque to honor the author’s work. Books eligible for the award must fall into the broadly defined category of international ethics. This includes, but is not limited to, books on international descriptive ethics, international normative ethics, metaethics,...
Oh Noes!!! Image credit: Tyrone Siu/Reuters Tracking vaccine scares in Africa. Edward Hugh on Abenomics. Paul Krugman's New York Review of Books essay on austerity features Mark Blyth's Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea (via). Some additional reflections on Kenneth Waltz and his ideas from Rajesh Rajagopalan, Robert Farley, and Michael Desch. Mark Kersten slams the ICC's website. Kelly Strøm: "How Syria Ruined Marc Lynch's Spring." Tom Pepinsky considers the possibility of an "authoritarian data advantage." Jay Ulfelder does TEDx. Footnoting Florida Polytechnic University's...