The Canard "All the fake news that's fit to print" The long awaited return of HBO’s wildly popular fantasy series, the Game of Thrones, has not generated enthusiasm on the part of at least one group. The nation’s international relations reference librarians, those who...
Bear with me, because this post has a long backstory. As many of you know, I'm a former policy debater. Indeed, so are a number of guest and permanent bloggers at the Duck of Minerva. And not a...
Why show a trailer for an Indian zombie movie? Two reasons: it has the word globalization in it; and it helped me make it to the Final Four of Twitter Fight Club 2013. To newbies, the first rule of...
In a piece that's bound to generate controversy among political scientists, Isaac looks at the "big picture" of the defunding of (many forms of) political science via the Coburn Amendment. What's...
Editor's Note: Back in February I riffed on a post by Erik Voeten in which Erik discussed two articles in International Organization (IO). One, by our colleague Matt Kroenig, argued that nuclear superiority gives states advantages in crisis bargaining (PDF). Another, by Todd Sechser and Matthew Fuhrmann, rejects this claim (PDF). After the two posts sparked some interesting discussion--both on- and offline--I approached all three about doing a mini-symposium at the Duck of Minerva. They agreed. Kroenig kicked us off with objections to Sechser and Fuhrmann, and soon...
Herbert Marcuse had some interesting things to say about certain political acronyms. The meaning is fixed, doctored, loaded. Once it has become an official vocable, constantly repeated in general usage, "sanctioned" by the intellectuals, it has lost all cognitive value and serves merely for recognition of an unquestionable fact. This style is of overwhelming concreteness. The "thing identified with its function" is more real than the thing distinguished from its function and the linguistic expression of this identification (in the functional noun, and in the many forms of syntactical...
Joshua Goldstein and I look at R2P After Syria. But, what will Syria look like after Syria? And, what exactly is the Obama administration doing there? Training and arming the rebels covertly but not with non-lethal military aid -- body armor and night vision. UN arms treaty blocked by Iran, North Korea, and Syria. Go figure. Title is misleading, but this is comprehensive look at Afghanistan -- will likely be at war long after 2014. Current Intelligence has a nice feature from Clive Schofield dissecting the myths and realities of Arctic competition. Bringing sabermetrics and moneyball to...
I am happy to invite my friend Tom Nichols to guest-post about the continuing Iraq War debate. Tom responded so substantially to my original post series on the war (one, two, three), that I invited him to provide a longer write-up. Tom is a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and an adjunct professor in the Harvard Extension School. His blog can be found here, his twitter here. His opinions of course are his own, so whenever he says I’m wrong, you probably shouldn’t listen… REK I’ve been reading Bob’s thoughts – cogent as always – on the tenth anniversary of...
Spring (where it exists) is the time of year when applicants to PhD programs find out the outcome and decide where, if any place, to go. While there are many factors that one must take into account, including what might happen if your preferred adviser leaves (Will Moore's take and mine), there is something far more fundamental: are you going to get funding?* If the answer is no, then the decision is painful but easy: don't go. * This post is inspired by a question asked at Political Science Job Rumors. Even if the poster was really trolling, it is an important...
I have enjoyed the recent exchange between Kroenig and Sechser & Fuhrmann (see here, here, and here). One interesting point that came up regards the role of conventional military capabilities in determining crisis outcomes. Kroenig says that the MCT data S&F analyze must be flawed because their results indicate that conventional military capabilities don't matter whereas we have good reason to believe that the strong do what they will while the weak suffer what they must. S&F reply that there's nothing odd about their non-finding because this is precisely what bargaining...
Nuclear weapons may be useful for deterrence, but can they also coerce? Our theories reach opposite conclusions: we say no; Kroenig says yes. Both sides marshal evidence to support their arguments. So who is right? Our goal in this post is to evaluate Kroenig’s empirical results and respond to his critique of our article.
About a month ago I wrote that: The recent obsession with MOOCs has its roots in three interlocking trends: the application of business-school speak to higher education, technology fetishism, and the quest to push down labor costs. It wouldn’t be too much of an exaggeration to say that these are three faces of late-modern capitalism: the colonization of all modes of life by scripts associated with capitalist exchange relations, the “virtuous cycle” of rent-seeking by advocates of “creative destruction,” and relentless pressure to enhance profit by increasing capital-labor ratios. I've been...