We need researchers with varying life experiences, and we need you because you are who you are.
Five Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me in Graduate School: Summing Up
read more
Featured
“With Malice Towards None”—A Plea for Cease Fire in the New American Civil War
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...
Are we honest when we write?
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...
(Insert Research Method Here) Doesn’t Smell Like Roses
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...
More Featured Posts
Blogging Awards Nomination Update
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...
Having it All? A Male Academic’s Perspective
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...
Friday Nerd Blogging: The Tasty Sequel
Much baking to be had this time of year, so it only makes sense that we play the Hungry Games again:
Human Rights Week Roundup: New Work by (Somewhat) New Scholars
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...
The Importance of Angry Letters
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...
The Good Old Days
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...
Will There Be Other Transformational Figures Like Mandela?
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...
Cyber Shrinkage: Loss and Cyber Security
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...