Paul Musgrave has written an important piece discussing how ideas developed within academia can have profoundly negative effects when they escape into the wild of the policymaking world. For someone like me who has been involved for many years in...
Paul Musgrave has written an important piece discussing how ideas developed within academia can have profoundly negative effects when they escape into the wild of the policymaking world. For someone like me who has been involved for many years in...
Ludvig Norman answers 6+1 questions about causal inference in interpretative scholarship
Always attack. Even in defense, attack. The attacking arm possesses the initiative and thus commands the action. To attack makes men brave; to defend makes them timorous. Steven Pressfield, The...
Everyone is (rightly) thinking about Afghanistan, but I'm still thinking of Tunisia. Each fall I teach a Middle East politics class. And each fall I end our discussion on the Arab Spring with a...
As access to vaccines continues to hamper developing countries’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many of these countries also face significant public debt burdens. The Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI), intended to ease pandemic-related burdens on low and middle income countries, expires at the end of 2021. The DSSI saved 43 countries $5.7 billion in total, paling in comparison to their overall debt levels. Last month, the Group of 20 (G-20) central bank heads and finance ministers offered a broader plan, the Common Framework, for restructuring debt to official creditors. They...
If there's one thing that American political scientists agree about, it's that the U.S. "job market" is pretty brutal. It's not uncommon for junior scholars to bounce between postdocs and visiting positions before getting a tenure-track job or a stable non-tenure-track position – or before throwing in the towel and leaving academia entirely. Still others join the ranks of contingent faculty. With stagnation in the market for tenure-track positions and looming headwinds for U.S. higher education, we suspect that a growing number of political scientists with PhDs from American...
Dov Levin answers 6 (+1) questions about 2020 book on foreign electoral interference. When do great powers back a specific party or candidate in another country? Can they change the electoral outcome? Find out.
A (very small) corner of the policy world got excited Monday afternoon: the Biden Administration announced its picks for top international religious freedom positions. This is an area I've worked in for over ten years alongside my academic work, but it's one that few policy experts pay much attention to. The reason for our excitement is the the same reason everyone should be excited about Biden's picks. International religious freedom policy: The forgotten floor of Foggy Bottom US international religious freedom (IRF) policy officially started with the IRF Act of 1998. This law created an...
Academics are increasingly becoming targets of online harassment, but too many universities and colleges are unprepared to support and protect their faculty. What steps should they take?