Even if you did have a LLM that could mirror human actions and decision-making processes in a wargame, it wouldn’t actually be sufficient to model how weird people are both as individual thinkers or thinking in groups
Or, who is the strawman here? This is my second post reflecting on the recent American Political Science Association annual meeting. The last one expressed concern about a new trend in the study of...
Are we reaching the limits of experimental approaches to international politics? I just returned from the American Political Science Association (APSA) annual meeting in Boston. I met up with some...
Did the pandemic durably change our pedagogy in International Relations (IR), or were pandemic-induced changes only temporary measures with which we have since dispensed? This is an open question...
[Editor’s Note: This is a write-up of a workshop proceedings. It is posted under my name, but the participants wrote the piece; they are listed at the end.] If Politics and IR urgently needs to discuss our approach to AI and pedagogy. The reverse is equally true. In 2025, the authors of this piece participated in a BISA-ISA joint Workshop on AI Pedagogies: Practice, Prompts and Problems in Contemporary Higher Education, sponsored by the ASPIRE (Academic Scholarship in Politics and International Relations Education) Network. This was prompted by several calls for Politics and International...
Our community lost the inimitable Raúl Pacheco-Vega this week. Someone who knew him better than me should write a more definitive remembrance and maybe they have in some other corner of the internet. But, I haven’t seen a longer treatment yet (here is a terrific one!), so I thought I’d have a go at a remembrance. Raúl lived his life on-line, as many of us these days tend to do, myself included, with much of our personal and professional life advertised in real time. His blog was a legendary resource for other scholars. But beyond the internet, Raúl I believe had a close circle of family and...
Reacting to a recent event on the study of religion, conflict and peace
When I was in graduate school, my training included the methods and theories of international relations but also some of the epistemology and philosophy of science behind the sub-field. We discussed what makes a good research program and how can we tell if we’re making any progress in understanding the world. One of my advisors was a fan of Imre Lakatos’ approach, which looks at whether a research program is uncovering new novel facts or adjusting its initial claims to make up for discrepant observations. My fellow graduate students and I suffered through the application of this debate to a...
This is my 20th year at the University of Texas. Although my dad was a university professor, I'm something of an accidental academic. I sought to get my PhD with the hopes of doing something more in terms of public service. I started off my PhD at Georgetown inauspiciously. In the first week of school, I sat down with the legendary comparativist Sam Barnes who asked me what my plans were. I said I wanted to run for Congress and if that didn't work out, I'd teach. Talk about clueless! I'm surprised he didn't kick me out of his office then and there.To be fair, I didn't really understand what...
Instead of Dry January, I'm going review free for January after having nearly 80 review requests last year. My New Year's resolution was to have a healthier relationships with reviewing, which had become a part-time, unpaid job (though I recognize that I'm still coming from a place of privilege). Nevertheless, while I didn't accept all of those requests, I did more than 30 last year. My fear is becoming Reviewer 2: the more reviews I do, the more I potentially resent the review process (former Duck contributor Laura Sjoberg has a good post on not becoming Reviewer 2). I don't want to take...
My New Year's resolution for 2026 is to somehow make peace with reviewing for journals. Something is amiss, at least for me, but perhaps it reveals a larger problem related to journal and book publishing. I kept a running tally of review requests for 2025. Give or take some error, I had 79 review requests, which includes some R&Rs, book proposals, and a several full books. I'm not including tenure letters. I didn't say yes to all of them, but I did do more than 30 reviews last year. It's occupied more of my time and mental bandwidth than I can deal with, and I've got to come up with a...
I started this post sort of confessionally. It's been a while since I wrote on the blog. I had started one earlier this year on the destruction of USAID and PEPFAR but redirected my energy into advocacy (such as it was). One reason for my relative absence on the blog is government service. From 2021 to 2023, I was in the Biden Administration serving as a Senior Climate Advisor in the Department of Defense. More recently, my father was in ill health and died at the age of 79 in August. He was also an academic, a distinguished scholar of southwestern American literature at Texas State...