The Duck of Minerva

Phil Arena

I am an assistant professor of political science at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. I mostly write here about "rational choice" and IR theory. I also maintain my own blog, fparena.blogspot.com.

Recent Posts

Classroom Activity: When Silence Says a Lot

by | 23 April, 2014 |

This activity comes after students are to have listened to a lecture (slides) on international institutions, specifically the impact they have on patterns of armed conflict. The first half focused on peacekeeping, which works better (under some conditions) than many appreciate, while the latter focused on how international institutions can deter bad behavior even if they lack enforcement power. The argument, which I previously laid out (in a somewhat different form) here, is that international institutions need not have the power to punish so long as the statements they make have an impact...

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Tuesday Linkage

by | 22 April, 2014 |

Editor's note: this post previously appeared on my personal blog. I've been doing links posts on Tuesdays over there for a while now, so I guess I might as well start cross-listing them. 1. Excellent post by Reed Wood on targeting civilians in war. In it, he discusses two recent papers (one by himself and my colleague Jake Kathman, another by fellow PSU PhD Jakana Thomas) showing that insurgents who kill civilians—who resort to terrorism—do better than those who don't. All standard caveats about correlation and causation apply, of course, but bear in mind that there's good reason to...

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Sanction Threats, Imposition, and Protest

by | 18 April, 2014 |

Editor's note: a more detailed version of this post previously appeared on my personal blog. If sanctions are to succeed as a tool of coercive diplomacy, they must impose real costs on the target. Yet, in most cases, they fail to do this—at least, directly. The economic costs tend to fall disproportionately on the average person, while the regime and its elite supports often find ways to benefit from newly emergent black markets. But might sanctions put pressure on the regime through some other channel? Say, by increasing protests? There have been many attempts at answer this question, all...

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Classroom Activity: Gambling Over War

by | 18 April, 2014 |

This activity comes after students are to have listened to a lecture (slides) on information problems as an explanation for war—which I'd say is the most useful explanation we've got. The broad contours of the argument are pretty straightforward, but the full implications are not. (That's something of an understatement. As I've discussed a few times before, a lot of very smart people have made incorrect statements about what this argument implies. In fact, while I'll gladly admit we've hit the point of diminishing marginal returns, I still think there's a lot we've yet to learn from this way...

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