For decades, many International Relations (IR) scholars portrayed experiments with foreign policy elites as too risky, too costly, or too difficult to implement. Faculty mentors discouraged graduate students from wasting their time. In a new article in European...
We’re not so different, you and I. We both dislike Hillary. It doesn’t really matter that she was among key players in the Russian reset policy back in 2009, we really don’t trust her – just like...
We're happy to announce some new guest Ducks, some old guests staying on, and additions to our permanent contributors. In reverse order, Jarrod Hayes and Heather Roff-Perkins have joined us as...
The following is a guest post by Nives Dolšak, Professor, School of Marine and Environmental Affairs at the University of Washington, Seattle, and Aseem Prakash, Professor, Department of Political...
Much baking to be had this time of year, so it only makes sense that we play the Hungry Games again:
December 10th was UN Human Rights Day, starting off Human Rights Week. In many regards, 2013 has been a very good year for human rights practices around the world. In other regards, 2013 has had some abysmal failures when it comes to human rights on the ground, especially the rights of sexual minorities. For our academic understanding of human rights, 2013 has been a very good year, with many excellent and novel pieces published in political science. Although this list is in no way exhaustive, let me highlight five of my favorite new articles of 2013 by (somewhat) junior IR scholars (all...
Editor’s Note: this is an abbreviated version of a post that originally appeared on my personal blog. How can international institutions foster cooperation given that they lack enforcement capability? One view, quite simply, is that they can't. This view is shared by realists and many outside the academy. Many would argue this critique is unfair. It is too easy to jump from "can't control rogue states" to "completely worthless" or "false promise" or what have you. Even states that view one another as friends sometimes fail to reap all the possible benefits of international cooperation due to...
When people lament about how broken academia is now (for example Higgs of Higgs-Boson), I am so tempted to generalize about the olden days: Many, if not most, jobs were not advertised publicly and many job processes were really old boys networks at work. The job market may not be efficient and does induce heaps of stress, but it is probably better than the olden days. Speaking of old boys, how many jobs were held at any level by women? By non-white folks? Things are not perfect today, but compared to forty years ago? Oy. Speaking of gender, there is still sexual harassment today but now...
Mandela's memorial service was yesterday, and the speeches and coverage were laudatory, as they should be, and the crowd was raucous, celebratory, despite the rain. Obama in his speech challenged the audience to use Mandela's example in their own lives, to "take risks on behalf of ideals" but in a studied, disciplined manner. I was most struck by the notes of dissensus, the public in the stadium booing South Africa's President Jacob Zuma when he appeared on the big screen and the coverage noting that the anti-apartheid movement and Mandela were not universally embraced by U.S. policymakers...
The nature of cyber discourse concerns me, and this is a point I have written about extensively with Ryan Maness (Valeriano and Maness 2012a, Valeriano and Maness 2012b, Valeriano and Maness 2014). The idea is that threats we see materialize from cyberspace seem to vastly outweigh any other threats we have faced, ever. Some argue this cyber threat is different, faster, and bigger. I question this conventional wisdom. Is the cyber threat really any different than any other threat we have faced? To this point, I have generally avoided writing about cyber-crime, but the logic suggesting...
Did you see the photos like the one above out of Shanghai? For the first time ever, Shanghai's air pollution, like Beijing's before it, exceeded the scale for particulate matter. For the past seven days, the air quality has been so bad that schools and flights were cancelled, cars were forced off the roads, industries were shut down (Though a marathon last Monday went on as planned. Runners complained that their lungs hurt. Go figure!). This post follows up my previous one a couple of weeks ago on whether China can gets its air quality problems under control. That was essentially the text...
Have yourself a gender-neutral Christmas, let your toys be yellow. From now on our princess costumes and toy guns will be out of sight.... Well, you try to rhyme with this material. The Daily Mail asked yesterday "how to shop for gender neutral toys" noting the sea of blue and pink dividing stores like Toys R Us. But when Toys R Us introduced a gender-neutral toy catalog, in Sweden, France, Finland, Norway, Germany, Denmark and France- featuring Spider-Man pushing a pink pram and a young girl wielding a gun- conservatives bucked, calling the images brainwashing and 'male hatred.' Play...