When thinking about what things I most wish someone had told me in graduate school… I found it difficult to not write about work-life balance, particularly today.
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...
Apologies for the delayed linkage. This Duck has been in flight all day and just landed (insert joke here...). Â 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...
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. Â The Slate article calls it the "wife penalty." Â I'd prefer it to be called the "having-a-husband penalty." Â 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...
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....
People may have wondered why spend so much time thinking about what pop culture says about international relations. They have have pondered whether dedicating entire class sessions to Harry Potter and the International Relations of Ethnic Conflict might be misguided. I can now officially and completely say to such un-named people: feh! Feh, I say! Why? Because the Sino-Japanese dispute is now an exercise in Harry Potter-one-ups-man*-ship! The only winner in all of this? J.K. Rowling, of course. What is so very striking about this, besides justifying my time spent reading/watching/writing...
Hi, Ducks! Happy New Year!  I'm back after a semester wandering across northern India.  Did you miss me?  Well, here are your links anyway... Professor Ole Wæver argues for "open science to fight big threats." Senator Bernie Sanders has asked the NSA a simple question that may finally make a difference.  (Okay, probably not.) This year will mark the 100th anniversary of World War I.  The New Yorker's archive has an excellent review of recent historical interpretations of the causes and consequences of that great cataclysm.  It is worth a read. The Broadsword blog notes that global defense...
What is better than one Nazi Zombie movie? Two of them! Yes, we have a sequel: