The Duck of Minerva

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Andrew A. Szarejko is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Wartburg College. He is the author of American Conquest: The Northwest Indian War and the Making of US Foreign Policy (Stanford University Press, 2025) and the editor of Pandemic Pedagogy: Teaching International Relations amid COVID-19 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). His work has also been published in International Political Sociology, Global Studies Quarterly, PS: Political Science and Politics, Millennium, The Cambridge Review of International Affairs, and The Journal of Global Security Studies.

Recent Posts

The Pedagogical Legacies of the Pandemic

The Pedagogical Legacies of the Pandemic

by | 19 August, 2026 | , ,

Did the pandemic durably change our pedagogy in International Relations (IR), or were pandemic-induced changes only temporary measures with which we have since dispensed? This is an open question and not one I can conclusively answer here, but this is on my mind as I am writing a new preface and concluding chapter for the second edition of a volume I edited, Pandemic Pedagogy: Teaching International Relations amid COVID-19. Perhaps the most systematic study of this question thus far comes from Rebecca A. Glazier and J. Cherie Strachan, who surveyed and facilitated focus groups of American...

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On Indigenous Political Thought in Video Games

On Indigenous Political Thought in Video Games

by | 19 June, 2026 | , ,

In something of a departure from my typical work, I recently published an article in International Political Sociology on Indigenous political thought in video games. As some of my prior blogging here suggests, I have been thinking about the place of video games in the study of popular culture in International Relations (IR) for a while. I make a couple contributions to that literature here. First, I argue that video games merit equal weight to traditional media in popular cultural research in IR; video games represent a common enough practice and a big enough industry at this point to...

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What’s at Stake in the Indigenous Empire Debate

What’s at Stake in the Indigenous Empire Debate

by | 20 April, 2026 | ,

I have a new open-access article out in Global Studies Quarterly, “What’s at Stake in the Indigenous Empire Debate,” in which I argue against historian Pekka Hämäläinen’s claims that the Comanche and the Lakota constituted empires. Many others have provided reasons why we ought not to think of the Comanche or the Lakota polities as empires, but as I argue, this debate has been inconclusive because it has been lacking any clear definition of “empire” according to which we might assess Comanche or Lakota practices. I find a good basis for defining “empire” in Meghan McConaughey, Paul Musgrave,...

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The Best and Worst of U.S. Foreign Policy(?)

The Best and Worst of U.S. Foreign Policy(?)

by | 27 March, 2026 | , ,

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) recently published results of a survey of historians on the best and worst foreign policy decisions in U.S. history. There are few surprises—wars in Vietnam and Iraq fared poorly, and the post-WWII creation of the institutions we associate with the “liberal international order” receives high marks. Among the most striking results to me is the fact that two of the ten worst foreign policy decisions in this list are related to the Indian Removal Act (one is the act itself; one is the forcible removal of the Cherokee). Even more striking is that...

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6+1 Questions about American Conquest: The Northwest Indian War and the Making of US Foreign Policy

6+1 Questions about American Conquest: The Northwest Indian War and the Making of US Foreign Policy

by | 30 September, 2025 | ,

What’s the name of the book, and where can we find it? American Conquest: The Northwest Indian War and the Making of US Foreign Policy (Stanford University Press, 2025). What’s the argument? Relations with Native American groups were constitutive of early U.S. foreign policy, and this should make us reconsider the notion that the United States was isolationist in this period. Moreover, the first U.S. war with Native American groups, the Northwest Indian War of 1790-1795, has its origins in the social networks connecting settlers to political elites, and the legacies of the war linger in the...

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Who wants AI in the classroom?

Who wants AI in the classroom?

by | 21 August, 2025 | ,

I get emails. Sometimes they find me well; sometimes they try to convince me that I need to bring artificial intelligence (“AI”) into the classroom. “AI is going to revolutionize higher education!” “Prepare your students for the AI-driven job market!” "Resistance is futile!" “Sign up for our workshop!” Despite being bombarded with such messages hyping “AI” (around which I will keep using scare quotes), it remains unclear to me that there is much to gain from bringing “AI” into my Political Science classrooms. (Are there worthwhile uses of “AI” elsewhere in higher ed? Maybe, but I’m concerned...

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After Anarchy? On Hierarchy, Heterarchy, and Multiplicity

After Anarchy? On Hierarchy, Heterarchy, and Multiplicity

by | 16 June, 2025 | , ,

Kenneth Waltz famously claimed that anarchy—i.e., the absence of a global sovereign—is the ordering principle of world politics, and much International Relations (IR) scholarship since then has aimed to debunk the claim that anarchy defines IR as a subject. Today, some aim to do so by offering new conceptual foundations for IR. This post is not a relitigation of the “paradigm wars” of the 1980s and ‘90s that Waltz’s work did much to provoke. Rather, what I am interested in noting here is that some seem to think that whether it is anarchy or otherwise, we need some conceptual foundation for...

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My Best Classroom Reads of the Year

My Best Classroom Reads of the Year

by | 31 December, 2024 | , ,

Amid the annual deluge of end-of-year lists, I started to think about what readings generated the best classroom discussions I have overseen in the past calendar year. That list of readings is below, but I first need to provide some context. I teach seven courses per year—three each in Wartburg’s Fall and Winter Terms and one in our May Term. These include courses in Security Studies and American Politics as well as general education seminars (of which I occasionally teach two sections per term). My classes are relatively small—usually 10 to 15 students in Political Science classes and up to...

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The Classroom and the Magic Circle

The Classroom and the Magic Circle

by | 18 December, 2024 | , ,

I wrote a chapter for a newly published edited volume, Teaching Political Science and International Relations for Early Career Instructors. The volume itself, capably edited by Michael P.A. Murphy and Misbah Hyder, is indeed concerned primarily with providing guidance for “Early Career Instructors” (ECIs) ranging from Ph.D. students to tenure-track faculty members. I was asked to write about mentorship for ECIs—given the challenges one faces in the classroom, how can mentors support ECIs? My chapter, “Teaching in Context,” argues against the idea that there is one “right” way to teach any...

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The Frontier Politics of Horizon

The Frontier Politics of Horizon

by | 5 July, 2024 | , ,

In the recent Settling for Less: Why States Colonize and Why They Stop, Lachlan McNamee makes a rationalist argument—“colonization projects” are “characterized by a triangle of actors—settlers, indigenes, and the central state,” and for his purposes, we can “assume that all settler migration is voluntary and economically driven”. McNamee is not the only one with such a reading of colonial politics. Director, co-writer, and star Kevin Costner takes a similar view of the nineteenth-century American frontier in his recent film, Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter One. (Hereafter, Horizon....

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