Tony Lang discusses philosophy, writing, and why the International Ethics section of the ISA developed into such a friendly environment for junior scholars.
Episode 18 – Tony Lang
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Clash of the Doctrines
Now that the U.S. presidential race has been whittled down effectively to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, and after Trump’s much anticipated foreign policy speech last week, we now have a Trump...
Five “Don’ts” for Introducing a Female Speaker (And Why This Matters)
This is a guest post by Janina Dill, Assistant Professor at the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics and a Research Fellow at the Center for Ethics, Law and Armed...
Ben Rhodes, Part the Second: Or, Journalistic Interpolations are Not Evidence
For those of you not on Twitter. FWIW, Samuels' appears to be walking a very fine line in the piece. /1 — Daniel Nexon (@dhnexon) May 6, 2016 Here's his inference from the 'grand deception' of...
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What Makes a Great Scholar?
I attended a celebration of the life of Kenneth Waltz held at Columbia University last weekend. The service was organized and hosted by Robert Jervis, Robert Art, and Richard Betts and included sixteen speakers -- family members, scholars, and former students who gave wonderful tributes based on their own personal reflections on his life, research, and teaching. It was clear that Waltz was gifted intellectually. His book Man, the State, and War was written in just over a year in 1959 and transformed the field. But this was only the start, he made major intellectual contributions in each of...
The Politics of “Fitting” Feminist Theory in IR
(Note: This post is cross-posted at The Research Centre in International Relations at King's College, London's Blog) Feminist theorists have long made and substantiated the argument that gender "matters" in International Relations (IR) theory and practice, and that it matters in complicated and hybrid ways. Gender analysis has been used (in my view effectively) across a wide spectrum of theoretical approaches, issue areas, and contemporary political events. I thought about this as I was reading news stories and opinion pieces expressing disappointment that Malala Yousafzai did not win the...
The Birth of a Sports Rivalry
How do we communicate ideas to our audience? What steps can we take to introduce advanced concepts to our students or the general public? Scholars work for decades on the content of their arguments but spend very little time thinking about how to translate their ideas for specific consumers of information. In Phil Arena’s review of Braumoeller’s new excellent book, he makes a baseball reference, later noting that he does not even like sports. This is a typical tactic in Political Science, if not all of academia. We often make sports metaphors and analogies in order to push our point...
Duck Forum on Teaching US Foreign Policy #2
[Note: This is a guest post by Steven W. Hook from Kent State University and is the second post on the Duck Forum on Teaching US Foreign Policy] “Teaching U.S. Foreign Policy in an Age of Uncertainty,” by Steven W. Hook (Kent State University) Students of U.S. foreign policy face a unique intellectual challenge: to understand state policy making at the intersection of domestic and global governance. Their instructors, who face the same task, need to integrate the two domains in their lectures and assignments. Along the way, they confront the added burdens of making some sense of the...
Thursday Morning Linkage – Apocalypse Averted!
Yay, pointless self-inflicted global catastrophe avoided. In between all the gnashing of teeth about whether the United States Congress would act to forestall a default on the country's national debt and actually reopen the government, some other things were happening around the world. I've been meaning to write about the energy and environment front for weeks, but my attention has been captured by the awful spectacle that was the U.S. Congress, namely the machinations of the radical Tea Party right. Before I delve into links about energy and environment, let me give conservative New York...
What’s Wrong with FETs? Thoughts from Gendering Global Conflict
(Note: This post is cross-posted at the Columbia University Press Authors' Blog) Over the last couple of years, the US military has begun to employ FETs (Female Engagement Teams) in Afghanistan, characterizing their purpose as "to engage the female populace" of the country. The mission of these groups of female soldiers seems to be divided between victim services, trust building, influence seeking, and intelligence gathering. Many feminist scholars (e.g., Keally McBride and Annick T. R. Wibben) have expressed their deep concerns about both the effectiveness of FETs and the ideas about sex,...
Duck Forum on Teaching US Foreign Policy
Duck of Minerva is pleased to announce the start of a four-part series of posts on teaching US Foreign Policy. The forum includes contributions from the authors of major undergraduate textbooks on U.S. foreign policy: Bruce Jentleson (Duke University), Steven Hook (Kent State), Jim McCormick (Iowa State), and James Scott (Texas Christian) and Jerel Rosati (University of South Carolina). Bruce Jentleson initiated and coordinated the forum -- as you can see below he has also set up a Twitter hashtag #TeachForPol to continue this discussion. In setting up the forum, he writes: In the posts...
Duck Forum on Teaching US Foreign Policy #1
[Note: This is a guest post by Bruce Jentleson from Duke University. It is the first in a four-part forum on teaching US Foreign Policy.] Six Concepts in Teaching American Foreign Policy by Bruce Jentleson As the Cold War went on, among scholars and teachers of American foreign policy there was some settling in to a sense that we knew the questions – containment? nuclear deterrence? Bretton Woods stability? ---- and were mostly debating the answers. Since the end of the Cold War there’s been renewed debate over what the questions themselves are. While this bears broadly on IR, it has been...