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: Commitment Problems

by | 11 April, 2014 |

This activity comes after students are to have listened to a lecture (slides) on commitment problems. The lecture focused in particular on how the anticipation of future shifts in power can create incentives for preventive war. After walking them through a formal model fleshing out the argument, I then discussed the role of preventive motives in the US Civil War and showed them that interstate wars have occurred more often historically when there was reason to believe that war in the current year would have a significant impact on the distribution of military capabilities in the subsequent...

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Social Media and Protests

by | 3 April, 2014 |

[Note: A more detailed version of this post appeared at my personal blog.] The Cairo protests that ultimately led to the ouster of Hosni Mubarak received a great deal of attention on Twitter—the most used hashtag in 2011 was #egypt—leading much discussion over whether we were seeing  "a Twitter revolution." But the mere fact that protests occurred at the same time as an increase in calls for regime change on social media does not establish that the latter in any way fueled the former. The same factors that lead people to take to the streets might drive behavior online. Absent a credible...

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Classroom Activity: Issuing Ultimata

by | 24 March, 2014 |

This activity comes after students are to have listened to a lecture (slides) introducing the second big puzzle of the course: why states sometimes burn what they want in order to get more of it—that is, why wars occur despite the inefficiency their costly nature implies. Over the course of the next few lectures, I'll be taking them through the main arguments of Fearon 1995 (see also this blog post) step by step. But before we turn to the explanations for war, we first need to understand the inefficiency argument so as to fully appreciate why common explanations fail. Today's activity was...

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Classroom Activity: Globalization and Inequality Within and Between Countries

by | 12 March, 2014 |

This activity comes after students are to have listened to a lecture (slides) on political economy, a considerable focus of which was on identifying the winners and losers from economic cooperation. In that lecture, I argued that trade tends to enrich the owners of, employees of, and investors in sectors in which that country has a comparative advantage, while it harms the owners of, employees of, and investors in all other sectors. One implication of this is that a shift from relatively low to high levels of global trade is that a small number of people in highly developed states should...

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