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...
The reactions I’ve received to some of my recent op-eds have led me to reconsider the relationship between scholarship and politics, and to question the role of social capital in shaping scholarly...
There’s an interesting debate going on over at openGlobalRights. Drawing on their recent Social Problems article, Neve Gordon and Nitza Berkovitch provocatively accuse human rights quantitative...
Russia has been one of the spectres haunting the US presidential election. President Obama’s latest press conference is a case in point: Mr. Trump's continued flattery of Mr. Putin, and the degree...
This article is cross posted from the Scottish Global Forum. In this form it is slightly modified and hyperlinked. The Nature of Threats to Scotland In March of 2015, a cry goes out in the town centre, everyone reacts quickly. Valuables are hidden underground; women and children are stored in hideaways to be kept safe until the danger is over. The sacred and expensive items in the church are removed and the priests flee – they are often the first targeted. The town moves to the defenses, but there is little that they can do to counter the oncoming scourge. The Vikings are off the coast...
Editor’s Note: this is an abbreviated version of a post that originally appeared on my personal blog. In my previous post, I articulated one way international institutions can deter bad behavior. In this post, I'll argue that even if we assume institutions don't have access to information that isn't already available to states, they still matter more than some appreciate. One of the most prominent criticisms of institutions is that they are epiphenomenal---that they put a name on behavior that would have occurred anyway. That is, some have argued that the good news about compliance is not...
In the spirit of the holidays, here's a fun movie trailer that actually kind of depicts a war on Christmas.... ok, a war on Santa. H/T to OTB for providing the video. And a big H/T to the Duck-sters out there who read our stuff here, give us comments, and otherwise make this place a fun place to hang out. Oh, and Happy New Year, too!
This has been on my mind a lot because the Korea-Japan meltdown has been so bad recently. And I think it’s a good research question if you are into Asian IR. I have written about this before and just did again this month and yet again. I’ve argued repeatedly that the reason America’s allies in Asia cooperate so poorly is moral hazard. But this is different question. It is meant to explore why Koreans exaggerate Japan so much. Why do Koreans – the media specifically - routinely say things like Japan is run by right-wing fanatics who want to invade the Liancourt Rocks with samurai? These...
What's right and wrong in the world this holiday season? This is a sundry list related to recent interests of mine, mostly related to humanitarian assistance. UN seeks record $13 billion for humanitarian assistance in 2014, half of it for Syria More than half of Syria’s population of 22 million is now in need of aid, according to United Nations estimates. In 2015, the UN will pursue a new non-binding agreement in Japan on disaster risk reduction nine months before the climate negotiations in Paris Typhoon Haiyan revealed major weaknesses in the Filipino government and military's capacity to...
Dear Kansas Board of Regents, Greetings. You probably don’t know me but I’ve been a long-time user of your services. I started my college career taking dual-credit courses at Pratt Community College in 1996, I attended the Kansas Board of Regents Honors Academy in 1998, and I am a graduate of one of your fine institutions, Kansas State University. After getting my PhD, I even returned to Kansas State for 3 years as an assistant professor. I “did good” as a professor at Kansas State – I published a lot, won a big teaching award, and didn’t make waves. Like a lot of people in my...
I might have to re-think this whole life choice. Tenure is supposed to mean more than just job security--that it is about academic freedom. To teach and research in ways that may not always be popular and certainly in ways that are not politically desirable. Yet in the past couple of weeks, we have seen that tenure may not be all that it is cracked up to be. The more famous case right now is at U of Colorado at Boulder where a prof seems to have been retired a wee bit early because of how she was teaching prostitution. To be clear, the topic is quite germane (this was not a math class)...
There's a Slate article titled "The End of the College Essay" circulating in various Facebook and Twitter circles critical of assigning long essays to undergraduates. The gist of the complaint mirrors the complaints I've heard over the years from students and colleagues (and others outside the academy) about assigning long research papers. Last summer, I attended a conference in Toronto on the future of liberal education in which a number of participants criticized the long-form research paper by noting that, unless students go into Ph.D programs, most will never write a long paper again in...