The special issue’s concerns could easily be a passing ‘fad’ as the forces of the status quo bide their time. A focal point on race, necessary as it is, could elide class and material factors’ influence on world politics.
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...
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...
Political Science isn’t sterile laboratory. The discipline is riddled with politics and deeply influenced by policy concerns.
Some political-science lab leaks are more difficult to control than others.
Paul Musgrave has written an important piece discussing how ideas developed within academia can have profoundly negative effects when they escape into the wild of the policymaking world. For someone like me who has been involved for many years in the Bridging the Gap project, whose goal is to better connect academics and policymakers, this argument is important and cautionary. (In addition to Musgrave’s recent Foreign Policy piece, Michael Desch provides a long and extensive history of academic ideas leading to bad policy in his book The Cult of the Irrelevant.) I was...
If there's one thing that American political scientists agree about, it's that the U.S. "job market" is pretty brutal. It's not uncommon for junior scholars to bounce between postdocs and visiting positions before getting a tenure-track job or a stable non-tenure-track position – or before throwing in the towel and leaving academia entirely. Still others join the ranks of contingent faculty. With stagnation in the market for tenure-track positions and looming headwinds for U.S. higher education, we suspect that a growing number of political scientists with PhDs from American...
Academics are increasingly becoming targets of online harassment, but too many universities and colleges are unprepared to support and protect their faculty. What steps should they take?
Film critics have approached Adam Sandler’s films the same way that IR scholars have analyzed the rise and fall of the Liberal International Order (LIO)
Simple steps to promote qualitative research in journals It happened again. After months of waiting, you finally got that "Decision" email: Rejection. That's not so bad, it happens to everyone. But it's the nature of the rejection that gets to you. The reviewers (you assume fellow quals) didn't engage with your careful use of process tracing, your intricate case selection method. They just questioned your findings, pointed out your imperfect data, and chided you for leaving out irrelevant historical details. Basically, the reviewer refused to engage with the qualitative methods that are...
I get the sense that lots of scholars are viewing the return (sooner or later) of in-person conference with a good deal of ambivalence. Is it time to take all conference online?