While it is hard to do and particularly hard to do while starting out, the general conventional wisdom (and wise it is) is that one should try to have three pieces under review at most/all times. Why? Because academic review is a capricious enterprise that often...
In early September, the circulation of the now iconic picture of Alan Kurdi, the little Syrian Kurdish boy who drowned along with his mother and brother in the attempt to cross the Aegean Sea,...
In fall of 2014, former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced his plan to maintain US superiority against rising powers (i.e. Russia and China). His claim was that the US cannot lose its...
We have not Friday Nerd Blogged in a while, and we are reluctant to do anything that might spoil the Force Awakens. Yet, my grading is done and my enthusiasm is making the Kessel Run in record...
The Duckies have moved from here to the Online Media Caucus, but that does not mean that readers of the Duck should not participate. Indeed, it means that the DoM is now eligible for nominations. So, wander over to the OMC and nominate for a variety of categories, including best blog, best visual post, best podcast, best twitter account and more!
In the follow up to Defense Secretary Ash Carter's recent announcement that all combat jobs will be open to women, there have been several articles highlighting men's fears about working with women on the frontline. In particular, a survey of Special Operations men found that the majority would prefer not to work with women, and that some held serious "fears" and "concerns"- especially in relation to women's apparently unpredictable bodies. That's right, the Special Forces- the tip of the spear, the elite of the US military- are scared about the three P's: periods, pregnancy and PMS. Most...
Thanks to PTJ, ISQ Online is running a debate about the scope and nature of the 'practice turn' in the study of world politics. The symposium centers around a recent International Studies Quarterly article by Christian Bueger and Frank Gadinger, "The Play of International Practice."* From PTJ's introduction: The challenge, then, is to develop an adequate conceptual vocabulary for practice-sensiblity scholarship. Christian Bueger and Frank Gadinger's ISQ article suggests that International Relations scholarship in a practice mode would be enhanced by a broader examination of the philosophical...
Building on Josh's excellent post calling out Donald Trump as a vile racist, the popularity of Trump has been troubling me for some time. As a professor who takes seriously the job of educating students how to think as opposed to what to think, I strive in class not to be partisan or allow my students to know my personal political opinions, lest it affect what they believe or argue in an attempt to curry favor. I have been struggling for sometime to find ways to analyze the Trumpian rhetoric (and to a lesser degree that of Ben Carson) to help students arrive at their own conclusions about...
For background on DA-RT, see Jarod Hayes' post at the Duck of Minerva, as well as John Patty's response to the petition to delay implementation (as well as its related website) and Jeffrey Isaac's response to Patty and Isaac's latest post. Roundups and responses abound. I drafted a longer piece on DA-RT, but now realize that I will probably never finish it. So, instead, some brief comments: I have neither signed the DA-RT Journal Editors' Statement (JETS), nor the acronym-challenged petition to delay it's implementation. My basic reasons are straightforward. The journal that I...
In the wake of the San Bernardino shooting and President Obama's address to the nation, Donald Trump has called for banning Muslims from entering the United States. This is counterproductive racist and awful. We need a credible candidate from the Republicans in 2016, not a reality television star who is a disgrace to the nation and its founding principles. Let's leave aside the morality here, which on its face is terrible, but recall what ISIS wants us to do which is turn this a religious war between the West and Muslims. ISIS wants us in our response to their provocations to eliminate the...
Late last month the New York Times ran an interesting piece about the power of language and climate change. Central to the story is the concept of a carbon budget. On its face, the concept is simple. Drawing on complex models of the atmospheric and energy effects of carbon dioxide and other heat trapping gases, climate scientists have proposed a global carbon budget: the amount of carbon dioxide (or, we should add, the equivalent in other gases which can be far more potent) that can be emitted into the atmosphere without breaking the two degree Celsius mark. Turns out the numbers are not...
The following is a guest post by Jeffrey C. Isaac, who is James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science at Indiana University and editor in chief of Perspectives on Politics: A Political Science Public Sphere. “I reject this paper.” “I recommend that this paper be rejected.” “I am sorry to inform you that your paper has been rejected for publication.” Social practices are constituted in large part by the words we regularly use and the meanings these words typically convey. Political science is a social practice. And variations of the sentences above are commonly employed by political...