While campaigning for the White House, U.S. President Joe Biden promised Americans that he would reenter the nuclear deal with Iran, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), so long as Tehran returned to compliance with...
There is a lot to think about in the aftermath of Trump's win. Lots of early hot talks will be wrong. One of the first reactions has been to wonder about the value of political science (which is...
In the wake of the shocking US election results, what sometimes seems like an agreed-upon virtue has become controversial: the demand for empathy. Writing in the New York Times, longtime Democrat...
An American first lady is about to make history. No, not that one. Nicaragua’s November 6 election has drawn few headlines internationally, but this week the New York Times ran a profile on Rosario...
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...
Apologies for the delayed linkage. This Duck has been in flight all day and just landed (insert joke here...). I'm attending the launch of the new AidData Research Consortium (ARC), which is a USAID funded research effort to use geospatial data on foreign assistance to ask and answer interesting questions. My bit is related to disasters and humanitarian assistance. I'll have more to write on the topic soon. It's been quite a newsy week, aside from the Chris Christie drama on the domestic front (time for some traffic problems ...). On the foreign policy front, former SecDef Bob Gates' memoir...
Ever since Wikileaks hit the headlines with the release of its Collateral Murder video I've been thinking (and sometimes blogging) about what kind of actor it is, what kind of politics it represents, what this means for global governance. But I could never for the life of me figure out how to really tackle these questions using IR theory. So I was thrilled to see Wendy Wong's and Peter Brown's piece in a major polisci journal, Perspectives on Politics, exploring these questions in the context of what the discipline has to say about transnationalism. Kudos to Jeffrey Isaac for publishing this...
Editor's note: this is a guest post by Brian J. Phillips, of the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics. What are the best International Relations journals? How do we know if one journal is better than another? And how should this affect your decision about where to send a manuscript? I recently worked on a ranking of IR journals at the behest of an institution, and this blog post shares some of the information I learned in the process. This might be helpful for graduate students and junior faculty still getting a feel for where to send manuscripts. A number of questions came up...