Last December, on “Giving Tuesday,” I encouraged friends and family to send donations to three of my favorite charitable causes in lieu of birthday presents: low-income housing, domestic violence, and Syrian refugee relief. My son and I had signed up to compete that...
At War on the Rocks, Mieke Eoyong intervenes in the Sanders-Clinton foreign-policy debate. Although the case made for Sanders' foreign policy by those she critiques—including Sean Kay—is much...
This week is the 10th anniversary of the start of Canada's combat mission in Kandahar. This was the most stressful Canadian "expedition" since the Korean War, as Canada skipped Iraq 2003 and...
Syria’s civil-proxy war is on the cusp of turning into an all-out regional war, with negative repercussions for all involved in the conflict. The humanitarian disaster is at its most acute to date,...
Why do some transnational advocacy movements have more success transforming global markets than others? Can we look to look to differences in market structure for a preliminary account? Why were AIDS advocates able to achieve extended access to antiretroviral medications for millions of people while climate campaigners have struggled to achieve comparable gains? This week, International Studies Quarterly published an early access and ungated version of my article with Ethan Kapstein where we examine how the structure of markets shaped the differential scope for climate and AIDS advocacy....
The following is a guest post by Dan Reiter, the Samuel Dobbs Candler Professor of Political Science at Emory University. Dr. Cullen Hendrix’s recent Duck of Minerva post on citation counts sparked a vibrant discussion about the value of citation counts as measures of scholarly productivity and reputation. Beyond the question of whether citation count data should be used, we should also ask, how are citation count data being used? We already know that, for better or worse, citation count data are used in many quantitative rankings, such as those produced by Academic Analytics and the...
A short time from now, at a conference venue far, far away (at least from Amherst, MA...): The papers on this panel examine the relationship between the Star Wars franchise and socio-political dynamics in the area of international security, broadly defined. In other words, this panel focuses specifically on the inter-relationship between pop culture ideas and “real-world” security-seeking processes and practices. The papers span methodological approaches, but all reflect on or empirically investigate connections between Star Wars’ fictional memes, concepts or allegories and the real-world...
When the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, the US was taken off guard. Seriously off guard. While Eisenhower didn't think the pointy satellite was a major strategic threat, the public perception was that it was. The Soviets could launch rockets into space, and if they could do that, they could easily launch nuclear missiles at the US. So, aside from a damaged US ego about losing the “space race,” the strategic landscape shifted quickly and the “missile gap” fear was born. The US's “strategic surprise” and the subsequent public backlash caused the US to embark on a variety of science and...
Now that Canada has decided to continue to train and support the Kurds in Iraq along with the Iraqi government, the question of the future of the Kurds is being questioned. Indeed, yesterday, I received a phone call from a magazine in Kurdistan asking me about referendums and why some secessionist movements get to become states and others do not. My short answer: "fair ain't got nothing to do with it" which could probably use a bit of nuance. This is not just a Canadian issue but one for all of the countries intervening (or not intervening) in Iraq and Syria. The one thing I do know and...
This is a guest post by Risa Brooks, Associate Professor at Marquette University Americans’ relationship with the military exhibits an odd paradox: the country’s citizens profess to hold deep regard for the military, while in fact knowing little about it and paying minimal attention to its activities at home or abroad. Analysts of U.S. civil-military relations remain seriously concerned about this peculiar mix of societal reverence and indifference toward the military. Less clear is why Americans remain so disengaged from an institution that has such a profound role in the country’s...
This is a guest post by Dan Nexon, Associate Professor in the Department of Government at Georgetown University and Stacie Goddard, Jane Bishop ’51 Associate Professor of Political Science of Wellesley College. In the wake of the Russian Federation’s intervention in Ukraine, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry declared that, “You just don't in the twenty-first century behave in nineteenth-century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext.” Indeed, a number of analysts see the return of traditional realpolitik, that “old-fashioned power plays are back in...
This is a guest post by Randall Germain, Professor of Political Science at Carleton University, as part of the Duck of Minerva’s Symposium on Structural Power and the Study of Business. Links to other posts in the symposium can be found here. A scholar knows he has been around for a while when the problem of structural power re-emerges as a legitimate and worthy subject of research. My graduate education in IR and IPE was pre-occupied with debates over hegemonic stability theory and neo-realism, which were, in their own ways, very particular demands to take structure and the power of...