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.
We Americans try to resolve the civil wars of other countries--sometimes heroically and successfully, sometimes clumsily, sometimes tragically worsening the violence. But these days, peace needs to...
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...
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...
I hope cold links are good as the temperature up in Ottawa is now just at 0F (known as the temperature where dogs whine and snot freezes in one's nose). Anyhow, here are my last links of 2013: Lots of stuff out there on the Chinese Air Defense ID Zone, so here is one that clarifies what it is and what people are getting wrong. The Aussies are out of their Afghanistan combat mission this week. Here is a document that captures the details of the effort. I found the Aussie case in my new book with David Auerswald to be the most fascinating because it was the most deceptive case. The...
The nominations are trickling in, but there's more work to be done. We had some major IR blogging events this year -- Snowden, Egypt, Syria, Russia, etc.... and we're looking for nominations for the best work out there in 2013. We're still taking nominations through the end of the month. Sage is co-sponsoring the Awards and the Awards Reception at ISA in Toronto in March -- here's their press release. Here's what we have so far for each category -- we don't have a single nomination for best new IR blog and only a handful of nominations for best blog post. Please send us your...
With Thanksgiving behind us and the winter holidays and family time approaching, the season encourages some stock-taking and reflection. We at the Duck have been having a bit of behind the scenes emailing about the challenges of finding child care, and I wanted to recount a happier story from my own experience here at the University of Texas. Anne-Marie Slaughter's essay in The Atlantic last year prompted considerable debate about family unfriendly workplaces and the difficulties for career women of the work-life balance. Of course, as many people pointed out at the time, the problem is not...
Much baking to be had this time of year, so it only makes sense that we play the Hungry Games again: