Tom Nichols, he of Death of Expertise fame, raised a few hackles over the weekend when he said marches really hadn't achieved anything since the Civil Rights Movement. News flash: You're not John Lewis or MLK, and this isn't Selma. And frankly, that was about the last...
This is a guest post from Joseph MacKay, a Research Fellow in the Department of International Relations at Australian National University, and Christopher David LaRoche, a PhD candidate in the...
A Presidential summit in May is not a high risk / high reward scenario. It is Russian roulette. Last November the media poked fun when inclement weather kept Trump from getting his opportunity to...
As a new mother of a baby boy I am enjoying a slightly different kind of golden shower than Donald Trump. So, between the 3 AM feeding and 4 AM diaper change I was scrolling through Twitter and...
Theory Section is pleased to announce the following recipients of our 2017 book and paper awards, to be awarded at the 2018 Annual Convention in San Francisco. Thank you to all who submitted books and papers for consideration for these awards and to those who served on the award selection committees. Congratulations to all of the winners! Theory Book Award: Emma Hutchison (University of Queensland), Affective Communities in World Politics (Cambridge University Press) Emotions underpin how political communities are formed and function. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in times of trauma....
This is a guest post from Clifford Bob, Professor and Chair of Political Science at Duquesne University. A free press is a major check on shoddy government policies and bad ideas, but if journalists refuse to think critically about government pronouncements, that civic function fails. Worse yet, if the media magnifies and exaggerates official errors, a veneer of objectivity is cast onto poor quality or biased government information. We have learned this lesson many times in U.S. history, notably in the lead-up to the Iraq War. Robert Wright’s excellent Intercept article of last week makes...
Thank you to all who ran and voted in the 2018 Theory Section Executive Election! The results are in and Theory Section would like to welcome Stefano Guzzini (DIIS/Uppsala University) as our new Vice-Chair/Program Chair, Jason Weidner (Universidad de Monterrey) as our new Treasurer, and Rafael Bittencourt (Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais) as our new Graduate Student Representative! For detailed breakdowns of election results, please click here.
After nearly fifteen years of study, what do we know about the relationship between climate change and security? I recently attended a Woodrow Wilson Center event organized by the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) on the state of the field. Along with Geoff Dabelko, Halvard Buhaug, and Sherri Goodman, I offered my take on the field (the video is embedded below). In this blog post, I wanted to focus on five different causal pathways that I think represent the frontier of research on the study of climate and conflict, which include agricultural production and food prices, economic growth,...
This is a guest post by Michael Bosia, Associate Professor of Political Science at St. Michael's College in Colchester, Vermont. You can find him on Twitter at @VTPoliticsProf. In December 2001 – less than two months after the al-Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center and not even a month from the day US and UK forces invaded Afghanistan – I was with Act Up Paris as activists carried a banner emblazoned “AIDS: The Other War” to lead their annual World AIDS Day march. Behind the banner, marchers raised signs reminding that more people were dying from complications of HIV every day than were...
“There is not one civilized nation in the world that ought to rejoice in seeing India escape from the hands of Europe in order to fall back into a state of anarchy and barbarism worse than before the conquest.” ~Alexis de Tocqueville, in correspondence with William Nassau Senior in 1857, regarding the Sepoy Rebellion in India. Psychologist Steven Pinker’s new book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, has caused quite a stir. The book itself provides the reader with an optimistic narrative about how the contemporary period is the best time to be a human;...
This is a guest post from Erin Tolley an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. Professor Lee Ann Fujii passed away unexpectedly in Seattle on March 2, 2018. This loss is personal because it has robbed me of a brilliant friend and colleague, but it is also public because of all that Lee Ann contributed to the discipline and to her scholarly community. Lee Ann was an expert on race, ethnicity, and political violence. Her first book, Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda, focuses on the social context of the Rwandan genocide. She shows...
This is a guest post from Tana Johnson, an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at Duke University. She is the author of Organizational Progeny: Why Governments Are Losing Control over the Proliferating Structures of Global Governance (now available in paperback, Oxford University Press). Van Nguyen is an undergraduate at Duke University, majoring in Public Policy and Political Science. She is completing a senior honors thesis on inter-governmental institutions and immigrant integration. Within its first year in power, the Trump administration has transformed the U.S.’s...