I am traveling this week for the 40th Anniversary Celebration at the Center for the Study of Women in Society at University of Oregon, where I completed my doctoral work ten years ago next month. CSWS was kind enough to fund field travel for my dissertation back then,...
Editor's Note: This is a guest post by  Stacie E. Goddard. It is the sixth installment in our "End of IR Theory" companion symposium for the special issue of the European Journal of International...
Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Andrew Bennett. It is the fifth installment in our "End of IR Theory" companion symposium for the special issue of the European Journal of International...
Well into the Syrian civil war the Assad regime has made a costly miscalculation by staging a significant chemical weapons attack. The U.S. and its allies have been wary of a full-scale military...
A few days ago, I predicted there would be no war, probably because I’m lazy and predicting the future will be the same as the present is an easy way to protect my credibility. But I got some criticism that I was a dippy academic who doesn’t see how dangerous the situation really is. And if I am wrong, I won’t be around to see it anyway; I’ll be swimming for Japan. So here is the most likely escalation pathway I can see, despite my firm conviction the North Koreans do not want a war, because they will lose badly and quickly, and then face the hangman in Southern prisons. I noted that...
The above video includes Sean Kay speaking about US-European relations and international security. Kelsey Davenport: "How to Read the North Korean Nuclear Missile Threat." Scott Harold and Lowell Schwartz: "A Russia-China Alliance Brewing?" More Sino-Russian cooperation on alcohol production would be awesome! The National Security Archive has a nice roundup of their materials concerning discussions between Thatcher and Gorbachev. Spoiler: the 'no German unification' agreement seems to have failed. And also: Holy !!#~@#! Has it really been two months since I put up an interview at New Books...
I know what you’re thinking, I’m being a show-off area specialist, Asian language names can be hard for anglophones (and vice versa), and who cares about KIS anyway, because this crisis is about Kim Jong Un? All of that is true of course, especially the first one, but come on… Richardson isn’t just any old hack like me on North Korea. (Here’s my take on the crisis.) He has been a regular point man for the US on NK for more than a decade and markets himself as such on the talk-shows. And if you study NK in even the most basic way (here’s a good place to start), you know who KIS is. He’s...
If you belong to APSA, you probably got the email announcing the last-minute closure of the Ralph Bunche Summer Institute because of the Coburn (left) amendment. Undergraduate programming like this is obviously pretty vulnerable. It doesn’t have the cachet of high-profile, ‘big think’ research. But it does obviously endanger the discipline in the long-term by cutting into our future replacements (almost certainly one purpose of the amendment). It would be no surprise if some of this summer’s bright students got turned off our discipline because of these shenanigans, or missed a seminar or...
I'm passing along some ideas from Brian Matzke, a Ph.D. student in the Department of English at the University of Michigan. Making social rules and expectations explicit is a big part of contemporary classroom management, and this document is a good starting point for other instructors developing their own syllabi or cataloguing their own expectations. This version has been very lightly edited; you can see the original (with comic strip!) here. Etiquette Guidelines for Students Interacting with Instructors Success in any college course is determined by your performance on the graded...
I've learned to limit consumption of Tom Friedman, except when he talks about the Middle East...yesterday his column suggested that the Arab Spring should be renamed in light of recent events...I think he is on to something, but I doubt his suggestion of "The Arab Quarter Century" will fly...my suggestion is the "The Arab Turn", which connotes both the significance of current events in the region and recognition of some kind of new era in the making, but leaves open the outcome...what do you think?
Here is your Thursday Morning Linkage! Algal bloom kills 240 of Florida's 5000 manatees (cause of death: natural toxin) Madonna smacked down by Malawi government after her recent visit Shale gas and methane leaks, greener than coal but by how much? Obama tells donors that the politics of the environment are hard, hints at what he might do on Keystone XL pipeline BP is beyond "Beyond Petroleum," sells wind power interests Nicholas Lemann asks:Â what happened to the environmental movement? New bird flu cases from China: how worried should we be? Tom Bollyky: Why does Gleevec, a leukemia drug...
And I bet that you all thought that I'd completely forgotten.... Robert Farley on the lessons of the Falklands War... for the PLA-N. Adam Elkus ruminates on the relationship between theory and math. Robert Murray: IR Theory and North Korea. Patrick M. Morgan's award-winning article: "The State of Deterrence in International Politics Today" (PDF). The (Proposed) US Global HIV/AIDS budget. Can Islam Karimov's daughter succeed him? And also: Jay Ulfelder is very, very excited about GDELT. Xavier Marquez riffs on another one of these "common human myths? Ecological event!"...