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...
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 is a life or death election for women and girls all over the world. True, many precious human rights and civil rights are on the line. Those rights--and the lives they protect--matter deeply...
Thanks to the Duck editorial board for having me join to guest blog for the next six months. I'm looking forward to being part of the conversation here. I bring experience working with the Senate on...
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:
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...