Professor Timothy Longman of Boston University joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast. He speaks about his decision, eventually, to focus on Rwanda as the basis for his dissertation.
Episode 19 – Tim Longman
read more
Featured
Testing to Twitter
Hey, our auto-tweeter hasn't been working so I'm trying to fix it. This is a test...
We Need More Metal! The Political Economy of Heavy Metal
The following is a guest post by Dr. Robert G. Blanton, Professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. For as long as it has existed, heavy metal music has been associated with controversy –...
Gearing up for the Academic Job Market: Don’t Dabble
There are many things worth dabbling in: Pokeman Go!, the arts, alternative medicine, old films, astrology, gourmet cuisine….the list could go on and on. I really like when people, including...
More Featured Posts
Tactical Concessions or a Kiss Off? Understanding Recent Changes in Chinese Human Rights Policies
As has been widely reported in the Western media, on Friday, China’s state media finally officially announced two changes in human rights policies: (a) an end of the “Laojiao” policy of “re-education through labor” and (b) a change in the one-child policy in China, allowing two children per family if at least one of the parents was a single child (before both parents had to be only children). Other, somewhat underreported, changes coming from the same official media report about the Third Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China included a reduction of...
Announcing the 2014 Blogging Awards and Reception at ISA
Duck of Minerva is pleased to announce the second annual Online Achievement in International Studies (OAIS) Blogging Awards -- better known as the Duckie Awards -- and the second annual International Studies Blogging Reception at ISA in Toronto. We are asking Duck readers to submit nominations for the awards and later to vote for the three finalists in each category. Last year's winners have generously agreed to judge the finalists and select the 2014 winners. Once again, we are thrilled that with the support of SAGE and the efforts of SAGE editor David Mainwaring and the Sage staff, we will...
Hard to Say I’m Sorry
The reports about the bilateral agreement between the US and Afghanistan that would allow American troops (and other western countries essentially) have suggested that President Hamid Karzai would support the agreement if President Obama apologized or admitted mistakes in the conduct of the war. This, of course, has produced a reaction or two, given that President Karzai might have a lot of gall to be asking of this given that more than three thousand outsiders (Americans, Danes, Canadians, etc) gave their lives to help the Afghan government. On the other hand, Obama just apologized for...
Tuesday Evening Linkage: Shorter and Later Than Ever!
My new job as semi-weekly Tuesday linker is off to an uneven start. I am behind on link collection as I was roaming this past weekend in the cell phone sense--in the US where my cell phone is super-expensive and wifi was not so available. Anyhow, here are some links that may be of interest to the Duck community (or not). IR/Conflict Stuff Christian Davenport has been blogging various tales from his fieldwork in Rwanda. Just some amazing tales that provide heaps of perspective sauce. Cullen Hendrix provides a very timely post on whether natural disasters cause or exacerbate political...
Campaigners Set International Agenda on Autonomous Weapons
The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots secured an important victory last week when delegates of States Parties to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) voted unanimously to take up the issue as part of their work to oversee the implementation and further development of the 1980 treaty, which regulates weapons causing inhuman injuries to combatants or civilians. The CCW process, which includes yearly meetings of state parties as well as review conferences every five years, have become a periodic forum for discussions not only of how to enforce existing rules, but of norm-building...
Mixing Scholarly with Blogging Identities
[Note: This is a guest post from Mira Sucharov and Brent E. Sasley. Mira Sucharov is Associate Professor of Political Science at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She blogs at Haaretz.com and at Open Zion. Follow her on Twitter. Brent Sasley is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Texas at Arlington. He blogs at Mideast Matrix. Follow him on Twitter.] Changes to our technology and to our scholarly norms present new challenges to scholars who engage in the public sphere. More and more academics in Political Science, and especially...
My Japanese Hate-Mail Tells I am a ‘S— Kimchi Propagandist’ (Hah!) …Where’s Thunderdome When You Need it?
Hollywood’s solution to intractable interstate conflicts This is what happens when you write in the area of Japanese-Korean relations. Pretty much everybody hates you, because you don’t tell them what they want to hear, and then maximalists come out of the woodwork to, as Robert Farley aptly put it, “explore Japanese-Korean animosity one angry e-mail at a time.” As I’ve argued before, there’s little domestic cost to the either party for the most outrageous rhetoric, so this just goes on and on. Given that intractability, the Obama administration’s big idea to untangle this - sending...
Why Write About Gender if You are Going to Get Blasted for it: diplomacy lessons from Miss Universe?
This week Dan Drezner hosted a guest post on the politics of Miss Universe and I responded by pointing out the lack of/and the need for a gender analysis in his post. In his response, Drezner asks an important question: "Why on God's green earth would I want to venture out from my professional comfort zone of American foreign policy and global political economy to blog about the politics of gender -- just so I can be told by experts on gender politics that I'm doing it wrong?" I think we should discuss this. I assume there are many others in the field who feel the same way. Writing about...