The academic job market is terrible. It’s worse for international students.
The academic job market is terrible. It’s worse for international students.
Professor Rebecca Adler-Nissen joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast. Professor Adler-Nissen is a proflic scholar known for her work on diplomacy, integration, practice theory, and her deep knowledge...
The twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks has come and gone. We've reflected on what led to the attacks, its human toll, how well America handled it, and what impacts the US response has had on...
Every self-respecting foreign policy expert who fancies themselves part of a realpolitik tradition talks as if the balance of power were everything. Now, I don't necessarily think of myself as a...
Fast fashion is generating more than just cheap clothing: it’s also a crisis of disposability affecting livelihoods in the Global South.
Paul Musgrave concludes the “Lab Leaks” symposium by engaging with his interlocutors and reflecting on the challenges faced by political science in an era of public-facing scholarship.
I was just about to block "Afghanistan" as a key word in my Twitter timeline when I saw several people asking why British conservatives were even more freaked out about the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan than American conservatives. The question was in response to the UK defense secretary saying that the United States isn't a superpower if it's not willing to keep up its endless wars. A UK intelligence officer swimming in the same ideological current commented that Afghanistan withdrawal "...marks the end of an era of Western liberalism & democracy..." Okay, deep breath. Plenty of...
G. John Ikenberry is one of the most influential scholars of “liberal international order.” It’s likely that he, along with Dan Deudney, is responsible for popularizing the phrase. John’s most recent book, A World Safe for Democracy: Liberal Internationalism and the Crises of Global Order has reportedly shaped the thinking of the Biden foreign-policy team. I interviewed him for a recent podcast.
Musgrave’s identification of dangerous ideas is correct, but his metaphor risks entrenching the fundamental problem: the (inevitable) weaponization of “scientific objectivity.”
Perhaps the problem isn’t that theories leak from the lab, but efforts to seal the lab in the first place. If political scientists spent more time observing the policy world, me might get both better and more careful theories in the first place.
Political Science isn’t sterile laboratory. The discipline is riddled with politics and deeply influenced by policy concerns.