In the northern city of Harbin, China, air quality was so bad ten days ago that concentrations of particulate matter reportedly reached 1000 micrograms per cubic meter at their peak, exceeding the World Health Organization's daily safe levels by a factor of 40 and...
It now looks almost certain that we will see a US military strike of some sort in Syria. There is a lot of angst out there about such a strike -- what are its goals? What will it accomplish? and,...
This is a guest post by Sara McLaughlin Mitchell, Professor and Department Chair of Political Science at the University of Iowa. In my previous post, I discussed some problems women face when...
Justice in Syria? The Maritime Labor Convention and the United States. This really isn't a matter of the United States, per se, but the unrelenting hostility of the bulk of the Senate GOP...
My frequent collaborator Jon Monten and I have a guest post on the new Chicago Council on Global Affairs blog Running Numbers. As our readers likely know, the Chicago Council runs periodic surveys about public attitudes towards foreign affairs and has historically run a number of important surveys of elite opinion. I'm cross-posting our piece here. For many observers of American politics, the fight over the nomination of Chuck Hagel as the next Secretary of Defense is indicative of growing partisan acrimony in the conduct of US foreign policy. However, concerns about intensifying...
It's that time of year in the Georgetown Government Department... when we juggle financial aid offers and admissions in an attempt to lock down a strong incoming class of PhD students. This takes up lots of my mental energy, leaving little for the Duck of Minerva. The current DAG-3QD Peace and Justice Symposium concerns one of Charli's favorite topics: Drones. This may come as a shock to longtime readers, but almost twenty years ago I interned for Joshua Moravchik at the American Enterprise Institute. Moravchik has a review of Robert Lieber's Power and Willpower in the American Future: Why...
Ok, this is late for Friday but we didn't have an entry, so here we go:
There's a lot going on in the world, but there's also a lot going on in my world, so here's your abbreviated linkage: Jay Ulfelder explains why big data won't kill theory (or as Dan would write, I can haz quant theory?) [Dart-Throwing Chimp] Seth Masket >yearns for a Neil DeGrasse Tyson of political science [Pacific Standard] Sounds like physics envy to me, Seth [Duck of Minerva] I'm actually normally pretty permissive on issues of pay for government employees, but this explanation of the Jack Lew bonus actually makes me less sympathetic to Lew. He's still incentivized to seek public-sector...
Earlier this month, The Guardian reported that the Obama administration blocked a Pentagon supported plan to provide arms to Syrian opposition forces. For civilians in Syria hoping for meaningful intervention to stop the conflict, this must have been difficult news to absorb. I was reminded of this story yesterday while attending an informative workshop in Amman, Jordan on Islamic law and the protection of civilians. At the time, we were discussing how a non-international armed conflict (NIAC) becomes an international armed conflict (IAC) under international humanitarian law (IHL).  In...
The broad goal of this blog, to the credit of its founders, is to bridge the gap between foreign policy practitioners and foreign policy scholars. Prior to joining it recently, I have known its reputation for doing just that. While in government I kept a mental note every time I came across a policymaker who regularly followed the Duck, and frankly I lost count. So in this vein I'd like to quibble with something I thoroughly digested as a student, regularly promulgated as a professor, and gradually began to question as a policymaker. It seems high time to question the usefulness of how...
Mornin' ducks... In anticipation of the P5+1 talks in Kazakhstan this week, let's start the week  in... Iran Yousaf Butt, a nuclear physicist, urges the West to make Iran a serious offer.  But Patrick Clawson argues that the Islamic Republic is just too dysfunctional to cut a nuclear deal.  Farhang Jahanpour at Juan Cole's Informed Comment blog argues that talks with Iran might just work this time.  Whose argument should we believe? In other news... For the first time since Iran and the US cooperated in overthrowing the Taliban, they have joined forces again to save ... wrestling.  Wait ......
Omid Kokabee is a University of Texas PhD student from the Department of Physics who was arrested in 2011 when he returned home to Iran over the winter break to visit his family. Though he is by all accounts apolitical, Omid was sentenced to 10 years for conspiring with foreign governments and given additional time in jail after he earned some money teaching other prisoners foreign languages and physics. His fellow students in the UT Physics Department have launched a campaign to try to free him. They asked my wife, also a political scientist, about what they should do.  Can we learn...