Anne Harrington and Jacqueline (Jill) Hazelton take center stage in the inaugural G&T episode.
Duck Podcast G&T series episode 1: Power, realism, and the politics of IR Academia
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Guts, God and Mystery: how the women and combat debate is all about emotion
War on the Rocks published an exceptionally written piece by Lieutenant General (ret.) Gregory Newbold called “What Tempers the Steel of an Infantry Unit” that has gone viral. Here, Newbold...
On doing ‘something’ … as academics
Yesterday the picture of little Alan (previously identified as Aylan), lying dead in the sand on the shores of the Mediterranean, circled the world. It provoked strong reactions from those who...
#BringBackOurGirls, Feminist Solidarity & Intervention – Part Two
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....
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Popular Culture Can Crowd Out International Relations
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...
Netw…. Um, maybe not.
Sent by a friend, who would rather we blog more on Syria. Or WMD. Or development. Or disease. Or, well, just about anything but.....
Pedagogical query
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...
Studying Non-Governmental Organizations: What International Relations and Public Management Bring to the Table
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...
Are US Interests At Stake in Egypt and Syria?
Steve Walt asked a great question the other day: Are U.S. Interests Really at Stake in Egypt, Syria, etc...? 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...
Krugman’s (Probably) Wrong about Apple and Network Externalities
Paul Krugman has an op-ed in today's New York Times in which he likens the rise and decline of technology companies to Ibn Khaldun's account of the rise and decline of dynasties: success breeds complacency and soon the barbarians are running the show. This happened, he argues, to Microsoft, which once upon a time dominated the computer industry thanks to network externalities: The odd thing was that nobody seemed to like Microsoft’s products. By all accounts, Apple computers were better than PCs using Windows as their operating system. Yet the vast majority of desktop and laptop computers...
Monday early morning linkage
Syria agrees to allow a UN team of experts access to the site of last week's alleged chemical weapons attacks. US government officials says it's too little, too late. The Tunisian opposition is back in the streets and is again calling for the government’s resignation. FP’s James Traub remains optimistic. Saturday was the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington. The Atlantic examines why it’s so hard to find a copy of MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech online, and The American Prospect has an excellent piece on the socialist roots of Bayard Rustin, A. Philip Randolph, and the original...
The Glass Half Empty: Gendered Problems in Academic Networking
Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Sara McLaughlin Mitchell, Professor and Department Chair of Political Science at the University of Iowa. It is Part 1 of a 2-part discussion. Many recent posts (e.g., posts here by David Lake, Dan Nexon, and Laura Sjoberg, and elsewhere by Christian Davenport and Steve Saideman) have discussed professional networking in political science. Given my belief that academic experiences are not universal, a viewpoint articulated by Will Moore (https://willopines.wordpress.com/2013/08/17/some-dimensions-over-which-the-return-to-networking-is-not-uniform/), I...