Like many, I woke up in shock at the massive earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria. The earthquake, centered in Gaziantep, has killed 3,000 as of Monday afternoon devastated southeast Turkey and northern Syria. In addition to Gaziantep, other affected Turkish cities...
A distinctly unoriginal take on the pathologies of overvaluing academic “novelty.”
When I first started teaching intro to IR, I closed the semester with lectures on climate change and the second Congo war (or "Africa's world war"). This was part of my effort to include current and...
Jarrod is joined by Daniela Lai (Royal Holloway) and Adam to talk about the role of big questions in IR scholarship and teaching. The trio engage recent tweets by Bear Braumoeller and Tom Nichols...
Looking for some podcast episodes to give a listen to? I’ve got suggestions.
Earlier this week, professional opinion-haver Tom Nichols posted a "short" Twitter thread complaining that the push to make IR a social science, combined with the dominance of realism, is leading to bad takes on Ukraine. Despite my mindfulness-inspired efforts to ignore annoyances on social media, I felt compelled to respond (with the above picture). I was tempted to leave it at that, but this sort of argument appears every five years or so, usually by someone who is far from connected to current trends in IR. So, as I attempted with Dying to Win, I decided to write a post we could resurrect...
I think a lot of people are kidding themselves about what grand strategy is—it’s worldmaking. It’s an attempt to put the power of the state in service of grand political purpose. States big and small can have grand strategies because states big and small have elites who use state power to serve their visions. When you think of grand strategy this way, most of what passes for grand strategic categories and policy prescriptions are exposed as morbidly violent, exploitative, and even reactionary. But wait, what is this concept of worldmaking? What about the “national interest?” What about...
Like many, I've finally gotten back on schedule after the American Political Science Association conference last week. The travel was easier for me than most others; the site, Montreal, is only two miles from home so I didn't have to deal with any airline mishaps. But I still, as always, wonder if the trip was worth it. Even though it's covered by my research budget, do I get enough out of these conferences to justify the time away from my family and all the coursework I have to catch up on? How would I even know? Shifting views of conference success I had unreasonable expectations for my...
It’s no surprise that current events regularly lead us to update our syllabi. That doesn’t mean we can’t make “surprise” an important feature of our courses.
Waves of global crises have generated challenges in nearly every corner of human life. Catastrophic climate change, an ever-morphing global pandemic, widening democratic decline, rising economic inequality, increasing violence, geopolitical rivalry, and war join deeply entrenched systemic racism and sexism to create a toxic cocktail. How can “experts” productively engage at this moment? Practitioners often seek out guidance from experts during upheavals like ours, but policy-engaged scholars face dilemmas that complicate their response. To begin, crises are often the product of complex,...
The security dilemma plays a central role in Walt and Mearsheimer’s reading of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But what if they get the security dilemma wrong?
It turns out that it’s hard to write a roundup of happenings at the Duck of Minerva when there aren’t many to speak of. Much of that’s on me. What’s my excuse? Well, the kid finally contracted COVID. The rest of my family succumbed in short order. So that was fun. On the upside, none of us get seriously ill. On the downside, we got to experience post-COVID fatigue, with a helping of mental fog on the side. We recovered just in time to take our long-planned trip to Thessaloniki. The official purpose of the trip: to participate in 2022 European Workshops in International...