The Duck of Minerva

Jarrod Hayes

Jarrod Hayes is an Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. His research interests include the IR theory, social construction of threat, societal mechanisms of security within democracies, and the social construction of environmental problems. His first book Constructing National Security: US Relations with India and China was published in 2013 by Cambridge University Press and his second, an edited volume entitled Constructivism Reconsidered, was published by University of Michigan Press 2018. He has published articles in numerous scholarly journals including European Journal of International Relations, Foreign Policy Analysis, Global Environmental Politics, International Affairs, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, Nonproliferation Review, and Security Studies.

Recent Posts

Is “Camp Qual” really our best option?

Is “Camp Qual” really our best option?

by Jarrod Hayes | 12 March, 2021 | ,

This is a guest response to Simon Frankel Pratt's musing on methods. Lucas Dolan is a PhD Candidate at American University's School of International Service. In a recent contribution, Simon Frankel Pratt offers an incisive conceptual dismantling of the quantitative v. qualitative dichotomy in social science research. Pratt points out that while “quantitative’ refers to a clear community of practice centered around statistically facilitated inductive causal inference, “qualitative” lumps together several distinctive research communities. Though not all named in the post, this implicitly...

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Qualitative Research Does Not Exist

Qualitative Research Does Not Exist

by Jarrod Hayes | 3 February, 2021 |

This is a guest post by Simon Frankel Pratt. He is a lecturer in the School of Sociology, Politics, and International Studies at the University of Bristol. In the social sciences, research and data are often divided into the categories ‘quantitative’ and ‘qualitative’. This is incoherent and should stop. There’s nothing informative in this distinction in terms of the logic of enquiry, the mode of inference, or the way data are used to support claims about the world. There is nothing methodological about it. But it won’t stop because if it did, our discipline would further marginalise...

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Uncomfortable Conversations at a Distance: Lessons from Teaching the Israel-Palestine Conflict

Uncomfortable Conversations at a Distance: Lessons from Teaching the Israel-Palestine Conflict

by Jarrod Hayes | 10 January, 2021 |

Daniel J. Levine is Aaron Aronov Associate Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Alabama, where he divides his time between the Departments of Political Science and Religious Studies.  Information on his research can be found here.  Last fall, I taught – as I have done every year since coming to the University of Alabama (UA) – an upper-division lecture-seminar on the Israel-Palestine Conflict.  The topic is never an easy one, with both the transition to remote teaching, and the acutely partisan political climate of the US elections, adding to the...

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Race, Racism, and International Relations

Race, Racism, and International Relations

by Jarrod Hayes | 25 June, 2020 | ,

This is the first post in our series on Race&IR.This is a guest post by J.P. Singh--Professor of International Commerce and Policy at the Schar School of Policy and Government, George Mason University, and Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow with the Robert Bosch Academy, Berlin. He specializes in culture and political economy.  Singh has authored or edited ten books, published over 100 scholarly articles, and worked with international organizations such as UNESCO, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization.  Twitter: @Prof_JPSingh Issues of race and racism are intense subjects of...

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It isn’t just about Wæver and Buzan

It isn’t just about Wæver and Buzan

by Jarrod Hayes | 27 May, 2020 | , ,

In case you missed it, quite the IR controversy has broken out. In August 2019, Alison Howell and Melanie Richter-Montpetit (hereafter H&RM) published “Is securitization theory racist? Civilizationism, methodological whiteness, and antiblack thought in the Copenhagen School” in Security Dialogue (SD) OnlineFirst. The authors conclude, after a tendentious (my assessment) reading of Security: A New Framework for Analysis(1998) and Regions and Powers (2003) that securitization theory is fundamentally racist and, deemed unsalvageable, should be ejected from security...

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Corona and Conspiracy: Post-Truth Politics Revisited

Corona and Conspiracy: Post-Truth Politics Revisited

by Jarrod Hayes | 13 May, 2020 | ,

This is a guest post by Sebastian Schindler, Assistant Professor at Geschwister-Scholl Institute for Political Science at LMU Munich, Germany. Recently his article “The Task of Critique in Times of Post-Truth Politics” has appeared in the Review of International Studies. Did the Corona virus really originate in an animal market in the Chinese city of Wuhan? Did it not rather stem from secret Chinese military labs, as early conspiracy theories claimed? Or was the pandemic planned by Bill Gates on behalf of pharmaceutical companies, as some Instagram posts suggested? And is the virus really as...

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