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 few other international-relations scholars. Well, this weekend is the...
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...
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...