Herbert Marcuse had some interesting things to say about certain political acronyms. Â 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...
Much ado. Investors keep getting burned in betting on the exit of members of the Eurozone, let alone the breakup of the currency/monetary union of the EU. And econ/business experts keep getting...
This is a guest post by Konstantinos Travlos of the University of Illinois and Brandon Valeriano of the University of Glasgow. The mark of the ten year anniversary of the beginning of the US...
Todd Sechser and Matthew Fuhrmann argue that possessing nuclear weapons confers few benefits for coercive diplomacy.
Homeland is the series for national security folks. Walking Dead is the series for those belonging to the Drezner cult. Combined? Oh my.
It's the Ides of March.  Be careful out there.  Here's a random selection of this week's reads: How Fear made America.  Scott Lemieux reviews Ira Katznelson's new book Fear Itself:  The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time. Anatol Levien questions the  "endgame" in Afghanistan. Ken Roth asks what rules should govern drone attacks. Charles Hunt on the on-going challenges of peacekeeping in DRC. North Korean propaganda video of life in the United States. Missed this earlier -- the four stages of Putinism. The guy who put internet freedom on the "grown-ups table" is leaving the State...
In this post, I seek not to defend the actions or priorities of a non-existent misanthropic being, but to defend the practice of analyzing models that assume human behavior mirrors that of Homo Economicus.  (I hope you'll forgive me for choosing a slightly misleading title in order to preserve space.) It's easy to criticize those who assume that human beings are ultra-materialistic, narrowly self-interested, willing to collect all available information (and perhaps in possession of information that isn't available), and immune to mistakes.  I have never met such a creature and hope that I...
Here is your Thursday morning linkage: - Breakthrough in the ongoing CITES meeting on the trade in endangered species, five shark species are listed, providing greater protection as shark finning for wedding soups in Asia threatens many species of shark with extinction - Vietnam and Mozambique are warned at CITES meeting to curb their consumption and poaching of rhino horn respectively or face trade sanctions - White House petition on behalf of Omid Kokabee, University of Texas graduate student I blogged about a couple of weeks ago - Stephen Walt reminds us that the reason the U.S. is so...
I performed a similar operation to Scatterplot, e.g., estimated the results of the current poll by assuming equal weighting for both the 2013 and 2009 poll results (explanation). For the Departments that moved from ranked to unranked in the 2013 rankings I assumed a 1.9--as it looks like 2.0 might be the cutoff for ranking schools. I forgot to include the actual rankings, though, so my spreadsheet (direct download) only includes scores. If someone wants to do a better job, feel free to start with the spreadsheet I created. Or just make your own. I haven't checked my work, but it looks like...
Casy Hogle reports on a World Peace Foundation panel on public-advocacy campaigns, which featured the Laura Sey and Amanda Taub. Edward Hugh on the decline of Portugal. The costs of the "eating local" movement: agriculture in the "global south." Daniel Martin Varisco: "life without honor." Adam Eluks: "a rack city on a hill: unsolicited advice to landpower and seapower." And also: The Disorder of Things has a new forum on "critical methodological and narrative developments in IR." Andrew Liptak discusses John Campbell, Astounding magazine, and the "golden age" of science fiction. This is my...
Naazneen Barma, one of the authors of the "Mythical Liberal Order," responded to my post of last week with a reply to my critique. With her permission, I'm posting her message here and my response. Readers, we'd love for you to weigh in with your views. Naazneen had this to say about my original post: I'd push back, in particular, on your straw man point. We started by defining the aspirations / ideal of the liberal order precisely because that's what so many turn to in defending it. Our goal was to separate the aspirations from the reality — and then to ask, very concretely, whether it is...
The good people at SAGE just sent this image along. It's a mockup of one side of the reception postcards that will be handed out at ISA 2013. We will announce the winners of the awards at the reception. The reception  will be from 7.30-8.30pm on 4 April in Yosemite A. Unfortunately, only conference attendees will be able to join us.