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Five Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me in Graduate School: Summing Up
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Is the International Criminal Court’s “Legitimacy” Problem Also a Gender Problem?
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,...
Applying the Emerging Trump Doctrine to Syria
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...
Trump and the Fall of Númenor—a comment from a sad political scientist
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,...
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Monday Morning Linkage
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...
Polar Vortex Nerd Blogging
Also, disturbing rumors are circulating about Darth Vader's involvement in the annihilation of the Death Star.
Digital Video Games and International Interactions
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...
Belated Thursday Linkage
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...
The Politics of Some One?
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...
Ranking IR Journals
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...
Shouldn’t we call it the “having-a-husband” penalty?
As Jennifer Grose at Slate reported this morning, a paper by Wendy Stock and John Siegfried at the most recent AEA meetings, had some very disturbing - but not surprising - findings in regarding women academics and marriage. The Slate article calls it the "wife penalty." I'd prefer it to be called the "having-a-husband penalty." In no uncertain terms, having a husband costs: "For males, getting married within the first five years after graduation was associated with a 25 percent salary growth premium relative to other males. For females,however, getting married was associated with a 23...
Tuesday Pre-Dusk Linkage
With the year barely begun, we have already seen much over-the-top, endless self-promotion, so I will try to avoid that trap. Instead, we should note that while the Duck is not just about applying pop culture to IR and vice versa, it does seem to be with us, including shedding insight on events in Ukraine. The end of the old year/beginning of the new year is a good time to take stock of things. Chris Blattman does so at his blog. I point to it because nearly all of his top ten posts are individually worth linking to, so as a collective they are very much worth a quack in his direction....