This a crosspost from Saideman's Semi-Spew. This week, we found out that Brandon Valeriano died. It is quite gutting as he had such a terrific spirit, and he was too damned young. Brandon stood out from the crowd at all the conferences as he was...
Intra-elite, state-centric society is a strategic front, and ought to be defended and put to use in the continued development of a global and decolonial turn in IR.
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.
There is no shortage of knowledge produced in various traditions and diverse scholarly communities. There is no lack of theoretical traditions and political thought that come from non-Euro-American and mainstream canons. There is also no shortage in theoretical concepts and approaches to global politics that are not produced in Anglophone spaces. Rather, there is still in mainstream IR a major problem of literacy to access, integrate, and dialogue with this wealth of IR scholarship produced in and from the margins
Sometimes you come across people that permanently change the way you think. About life, yourself, or an area of study. They instill a sense of resolute optimism about the world and your abilities. Bear Braumoeller was that person for us. Wise, accomplished, brilliant, humble, and kind. Anyone who can be remembered that way lived life well. Bear is one of those people. He was our professor, mentor, colleague, and friend. We were richer for knowing him, and are poorer for his passing. We first got the chance to meet Bear during our recruitment process to Ohio State. We gravitated toward him...
There is an increasing focus in academic and policy circles on research-policy partnerships. These partnerships are often achieved through co-creation, or “the joint production of innovation between combinations of industry, research, government and civil society.” Co-creation is central to innovation in the hard sciences and technology, but its role in international relations scholarship and aid policy remains underdeveloped. As scholars of international aid practice, we believe that co-creation can help us design and conduct more relevant, rigorous, and impactful research. It is also a...
I replicated the go-to method for using ChatGPT to “cheat” on college essays. Here are my takeaways.
UPDATE: As a commenter helpfully pointed out, the person whose tweet I'm responding to was a political science Professor, not a historian. This kind of messes with the framing of this post but rather than stealth re-write it I'll leave it as is and let you interpret my Freudian slip as you like When I was in grad school, my Department's grad student organization made shirts that read, "Political Science: Four sub-fields, no discipline." Behind this joke is a common observation about political science, that it is defined by its focus rather than a formal set of methods or theories. Not...
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 were Sanliurfa and Diyarbakir [Note-these aren't the proper spellings as I can't figure out how to insert Turkish characters]. The tragedy of Turkey's southeast Any destruction and death on this scale is a tragedy, but the earthquake followed a string of other problems for the region. Turkey's southeast was long marginalized,...
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 overlooked aspects of international relations. As time went on, and discussions spread about how IR should deal with racial and environmental issues, I expanded these lectures. The former now looks at whether IR is up to the task of addressing current crises like climate change. And the latter looks at whether ethnocentrism in IR can be fixed. This is connected to my general approach to IR, which...
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 (the latter of which Peter also addresses in a post) as they discuss the place of big questions in teaching and research. https://duckofminerva.podbean.com/e/does-ir-ask-big-questions/