The Duck of Minerva

Steve Saideman

Steve Saideman is Professor and the Paterson Chair in International Affairs at Carleton University’s Norman Paterson School of International Affairs. He has written The Ties That Divide: Ethnic Politics, Foreign Policy and International Conflict; For Kin or Country: Xenophobia, Nationalism and War (with R. William Ayres); and NATO in Afghanistan: Fighting Together, Fighting Alone (with David Auerswald), and elsewhere on nationalism, ethnic conflict, civil war, and civil-military relations.

Recent Posts

Pondering Failure in Afghanistan

by Steve Saideman | 11 October, 2011 |

 Colonel Gian Gentle, a confirmed counterinsurgency [COIN] skeptic, raises questions for Col. Paul Yingling about the role of generals as COIN seems to be falling short in Afghanistan.  Yingling made much noise in 2007 by attacking American generals for poor leadership in 2007, as the US was losing in Iraq at the time.  Gentle is essentially pushing Yingling either to call Petraeus a bad general now (since Afghanistan is not such a happy place) or retract his earlier criticisms.While this is an argument between two Colonels, I am stepping in because I received a similar question last week at...

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Crowdsourcing for Analogies

by Steve Saideman | 4 October, 2011 |

 Earlier today, I tweeted and blogged and even (dare I say it) facebooked to get some help.  The challenge: to come up with a good analogy to capture the incredibly strange idea that cutting foreign aid might be a way to address the US fiscal crisis.My starting point: Cutting foreign aid to address the budget crisis is like an alcoholic cutting back on apertifs.The responses thus far:  Cutting foreign aid to address the budget crisis is like an alcoholic cutting back on chocolate liquor candies. Nominated by The Duck's own Dan Nexon. A big improvement on mine.Cutting foreign aid to address...

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Life Imitiating Political Science and Vice Versa

by Steve Saideman | 15 September, 2011 |

I had a nice life imitating art (or science) today.  I was lecturing about identity and the stuff we political scientists have borrowed from social psychology to explain ethnic conflict today.  The idea is to get my IR of Ethnic Conflict class exposed to the basics before we move on to the international relations issues that are the heart of this course.So, today, I am quite aware of my identity and how my self-esteem depends on how I see my group and how others see my group.  Then I notice a blog about Teaching Political Science which links to an article that focuses almost entirely on...

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Late Summer Tour of NATO

by Steve Saideman | 29 August, 2011 |

Happy NATO Day!  Okay, this is not an anniversary of anything NATO-esque.  But heaps of posts a-twitter about NATO, its members and so on.  So, some semi-random shots at some semi-random NATO members and NATO in general.First, France is the best-est ally ever!  Lots of people linking to this article.  Yes, the Libyan adventure certainly raises France's profile as an active contributor, assertive military and the rest.  But to be fair to the French (yes, completely out of character for me, given how easy it is to make jokes in my big lecture class), the Libyan crisis is not the first time...

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What Not to Do in Libya

by Steve Saideman | 23 August, 2011 |

I am pretty much as ignorant about Libya as the next person, so let me just suggest a few generic lessons learned from other conflicts:Don't hold elections immediately.  Everyone likes to do so to give the new folks legitimacy, but then it usually means empowering those who might not be the best folks to be empowered (see Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan). Think carefully about the guys with guns on both sides. Biggest mistake in early Iraq was firing the Iraqi military.  Helped to create the insurgency.  There has been a cottage industry in Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) and...

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Key Constraint on Policy Relevance

by Steve Saideman | 25 July, 2011 |

Dan Drezner has a great post today about how the foreign policy smart set (his phrase) gets so frustrated by domestic politics that they tend to recommend domestic political changes that are never going to happen.I would go one step further and suggest that one of the key problems for scholars who want to be relevant for policy debates is that we tend to make recommendations that are "incentive incompatible."  I love that phrase.  What is best for policy may not be what is best for politics, and so we may think we have a good idea about what to recommend but get frustrated when our ideas do...

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Stuff Political Scientists Like to Obsess About

by Steve Saideman | 30 June, 2011 |

 Not to step on Brian‘s territory, but I just wanted to cross-post here something that I wanted to propose.One of the recurring themes on my blog and at the Poli Sci Job Rumor site is that of rankings.  See here, here, and here for a taste of my fixation. Anyhow, I am always reminded of a simple fact when I see any political science ranking of journals, presses, departments whatever: that whenever a ranking is suggested or revised, it is always suggested by someone who benefits from the new ranking.  Nobody ever proposes a ranking that puts their department lower.  So, Godwin's Law--that the...

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Realist Dreams

by Steve Saideman | 26 June, 2011 |

 The Realist tradition in International Relations long ago won the big battle by getting the best name.  By calling itself Realism, the realist tradition makes all other approaches to IR seem idealistic, based in dreams but not realities.  Anything but grounded in hard, cold calculations of how things really are.  But the joy of realism is how often its acolytes indulge in fantasy.  Ah, but only if we could have the good old days of the cold war, for instance.*  *  Insert gratuitous cite of Mearsheimer's piece in International Security.Who do realists look to as their latter-day Bismarck? ...

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Friday Nerdism, A Day Early

by Steve Saideman | 23 June, 2011 |

Charli Carpenter has thrown down the gauntlet.  She has pondered (on facebook) whether/why IR folks have not been blogging about Game of Thrones.  Why?  Because we are tired.  Every episode is such great TV that we are left in awe.  Our brains are so focused on getting the names straight, understanding the dynamics within each family and between them, that we no brainpower left to use.Spoilers lurk below: Ok, that was an excuse.  The real reason is that I have not read the books yet, so my spelling of all of the names would suck.  But, let me use some simple IR theory to predict the next...

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EU Wins One, Right?

by Steve Saideman | 26 May, 2011 |

With Serbia arresting the last big PIFWC (person indicted for war crime--my favorite NATO acronym)--Ratko Mladic (see my post about the previous arrest, of Karadzic), does this mean that I was wrong about the power of conditionality?  That is, the Steve and Bill book argues that we ought not overestimate the threats organizations like the European Union or NATO make about conditions for membership.  We argue there and elsewhere that the requirements are unenforced (Cyprus gets in despite not settling its ethnic problems, Romania and Bulgaria get in with their shaky rule of law); that the...

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