Professor Julie Kaarbo (U. of Edinburgh) discusses role theory, the relationship between FPA and IR theory, and a new project she is calling Breaking Bad. As always thanks go to Steve Dancz (https://stevedancz.com) for our theme music.
My first post on the Duck focused on the emergence of the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag and campaign, pointing also to the ease with which hashtags can get appropriated and campaigns derailed....
Why Worry About Online Media and Academic Freedom? Um, because academic administrations have lousy instincts? I have gotten involved in this whole online media intersecting with academic freedom...
This is a guest post by both Nexon and Patrick Thaddeus Jackson. Standard disclaimers apply. Cullen Hendrix's guest post is a must read for anyone interested in citation metrics and...
This is a guest post by Sara McLaughlin Mitchell, Professor and Department Chair of Political Science at the University of Iowa. In my previous post, I discussed some problems women face when networking in political science. Here I focus on the progress we have made. As a quantitative conflict scholar, I spend a great deal of time networking in several male-dominated research communities, including the Peace Science Society, the ISA SSIP section, the APSA Conflict Processes section, and the Society for Political Methodology. I first presented at a Peace Science meeting in 1996, being one...
Justice in Syria? The Maritime Labor Convention and the United States. This really isn't a matter of the United States, per se, but the unrelenting hostility of the bulk of the Senate GOP caucus to multilateral treaties. Kupchan and Trubowitz remain, unfortunately, vindicated. Frank Beer discusses the past and present of NATO at e-International Relations. Peter Gleick argues that we are hitting "peak water" in the American West. An evolutionary-psychology debate involing PZ Myers. Via 3QD. US game developers critique their Japanese counterparts. That's all, folks. Time to take the kid...
The US and UK are apparently preparing for air strikes against the Syrian Assad regime, claiming there is little doubt that it is responsible for horrific chemical weapons attacks. Syria has allegedly crossed President Obama's 'red line.' Britain's Foreign Secretary William Hague claims that "We can not in the twenty first century allow the idea that chemical weapons can be used with impunity, that people can be killed in this way and that there are no consequences for it." Several problems here: This rush to judgment is happening before the UN has established beyond reasonable doubt who is...
Daniel Drezner writes that Meghan McCain's proposition that attention paid to Miley Cyrus can crowd out attention paid to Syria is bunk. With all due regard to Drezner, let me debunk the bunk claim---or, at least, show that the "Twerking Kills" hypothesis is plausible: This paper studies the influence of mass media on U. S. government response to approximately 5,000 natural disasters occurring between 1968 and 2002. These disasters took nearly 63,000 lives and affected 125 million people per year. We show that U. S. relief depends on whether the disaster occurs at the same time as other...
Sent by a friend, who would rather we blog more on Syria. Or WMD. Or development. Or disease. Or, well, just about anything but.....
Happy first day of Fall classes, at least at my university. A question for discussion: Is there any value whatsoever to a live lecture delivered in front of large numbers of students, given that podcasting is now sufficiently easy and ubiquitous that anyone with a laptop or a smartphone (or a digital voice recorder or camcorder) or access to those devices via a campus IT services department can do it? I would appreciate it if we could have this discussion without appealing to any mystical or metaphysical "connection" that mysteriously arises in a live lecture hall. What, if anything, is the...
In my grad class every semester, I always ask the students if IR is really the best field for studying human security. Undoubtedly, I get some students who respond that political science is the best discipline and IR is the best field – or even the only field – to really study human security. However, I usually also get a large minority of the students who acknowledge off the bat that most of the phenomena we study could be similarly examined in other social sciences or  -gasp!- could even be looked at by people in the humanities. This is definitely the case for the study of human security...
Steve Walt asked a great question the other day: Â Are U.S. Interests Really at Stake in Egypt, Syria, etc...? Â In posing the question, he cited a recent comment from Brendan Green, a visiting professor at the LBJ School at the University of Texas-Austin: "Pre-2011, if you said that Mubarak would fall, that Egypt would experience a mass political mobilization that destroyed its political order several times over, that the streets of Cairo would run red with blood; that 100,000 would die in Syria, that the Levant would be aflame; that the entire region would start to conduct much of its...