Mostly, I muddled through grad school, but with the support of my cohort and guidance from a few choice people, I was able to navigate my way through the uncertainty of graduate school.
Yesterday, Russia became the fourth country in recent weeks to announce its intent to withdraw from the Rome Statute and the International Criminal Court. In doing so, it joins South Africa,...
By and large, world leaders have gone from being taken aback about Donald Trump’s unexpected victory to being outright alarmed. Exceptions to this rule are Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad, both...
This is a guest post by Eric Grynaviski, an Associate Professor of Political Science at International Affairs at George Washington University. He is the author of Constructive Illusions (Cornell,...
The new and quite awesome-looking Season 4 trailer promises "war, death, hell," or as the Christian Post puts it, "action and intrigue." Duh. But it also hints at many more diversions from the books to come. Here is a breakdown. For Game of Thrones book fans, this may be appropriate:
When you do not know what to say, “summon up this word and then you've got a lot to say! Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!” says Marry Poppins. I wish I could quote her when I do not know what to say to an MA student who wants to get a Ph.D. but perhaps should not. I think I am not alone. Engaging a student who may be better served by a non-academic career must be difficult for anyone. Yet anecdotal evidence suggests that it may be harder for junior faculty. A new leaf has been turned, graduation is around the corner. Students begin to request letters of recommendation right around this...
Digital Media and Human Security At Lawfare Blog, Jean Marie Simon's review of Robert Nickelberg's Afghanistan: A Distant War explores the role of digital photography in constructing wartime imaginaries. At Reductress, Andi Sharavsky describes the "Cutest Ways to Photograph Yourself Hugging Third-World Children." Is there no end to the damage caused by Edward Snowden? Iranians are now privy to the US' most important national secret: that America is actually run by space aliens. HP: "Facebook wages war on the nipple" in reaction to new anti-topless-law documentary Free the Nipple. Human...
For the last few years in particular, there has been a marked increase in the number of sessional, casual, teaching-only, adjunct, fixed term, temporary job 'opportunities' listed and circulated in the usual IR job venues. These various titles and categories point to one reality: precarious labor is a permanent reality within academia. The trend has been quantified and well documented: in US in the last 30 years the percentage of positions held by tenured or tenure-track faculty members fell from 56.8% to 35.1%. In an excellent post in the Chronicle, Peter Conn declares "Full-time tenured...
I know book reviews bore everyone, but the journal where I published this doesn’t post electronic versions of book reviews. So I thought this would be a good place to put it for internet accessibility. I tried to make this interesting by focusing on trends in NK, rather than just summarizing the constituent essays. It’s a great introduction to North Korea with lots of big names. I learned a lot from it. But I had to object to the title, likely chosen by an ill-informed editor looking for something catchy. North Korea is not in transition. If anything, we should be focusing on how remarkably...
Hi. Here are some links to help you get your week started... Richard Shapcott reviews Daniel J. Levine's Recovering International Relations: The Promise of Sustainable Critique. The book is compared to P.T. Jackson's The Conduct of Inquiry. Shapcott says that "Levine’s goal is to place the idea of a moral/ethical vocation at the heart of the discipline and to argue that the vocation requires international relations thinkers to approach their own theorizing with a different attitude or posture—one of humility and “sustainable critique.”" The MLA is moving closer to adopting a resolution to...
Also, disturbing rumors are circulating about Darth Vader's involvement in the annihilation of the Death Star.
It has been an interesting week, I have been at a small conference in the US on cyber security and the question frequently asked is what are you working on? I think the assumption was that I would reply with something in the realm of cyber security, but that would be too clichéd for me. This week my research focus has been video games (we prefer to use the digital games since it encompasses all forms of the gaming industry). Digital games have surpassed movies as the most profitable dimension of the entertainment industry. Due to this shift, an interesting question is if there are...