Whether scholars embed policy recommendations in their work is a flawed measure of whether work is policy-relevant. Across a series of articles and book chapters, Michael Desch and Paul Avey have argued international relations scholarship is...
I never thought that when I started grad school I’d be relocating to another country. Then again, when I got the job in Canada, it did not really occur to me that I was “really” leaving the US – on...
In the Greek bailout episode the Greek government has been behaving much like the self-pitying Antonio from “The Merchant of Venice,” while the EU has been posing as a rather heavy-handed Shylock....
After you have seen the fall foliage at ISS-ISAC, why not see beautiful St. Louis, MO in November? ISA-Midwest - my FAVORITE conference - is November 19th - 22nd. Deadline for submissions is July...
Some of you have asked why I pulled the post, “Intellectual Jailbait: Networking at APSA,” which I put up last night. First, a lot of people were obviously hurt by the post. Those of us who blog of course want to be read, and I try to use humor to get my points across. I think that most humor, or at least mine, tries to go up to the edge of inappropriateness without crossing it. You don’t know until you cross it until you do, however. I would have never posted this if I thought that it would hurt a lot of feelings. Second, I felt that people were missing the main message, which was to focus...
The question of networking tends to arise as conferences approach. With APSA less than two weeks away (which means discussants are going to be getting papers any day now--ok, in about a week if they are lucky), I thought I would post some thoughts about networking. There was a post earlier today that did address such stuff, but, well, stuff happened. A key point was lost in the course of events--that networking sideways and down is far easier and perhaps far more fruitful than trying to connect with the big names in the discipline. For many networking is pretty uncomfortable stuff, as...
In our conclusion to Kiersey and Neumann's Battlestar Galatica and International Relations, Peter Henne and I lament the relative lack of interest among cultural-turn international-relations scholars in video games. Our case rests on a comparison of the number of people who have played franchises such as Halo and Mass Effect to those who have watched the re-imagined BSG. But the downside to neglect isn't simply about the size of audience and consequent real-world significance. Non-gamers may not know it, but recent years have seen a wave of experimentation in video games driven by the rise...
Sad turn of events in Egypt, a situation in which the U.S. is inextricably implicated. Not sure if there was a policy course we should have followed that would have been different. I understand the defenders of the democratic process who would have wanted Morsi to leave via the ballot box. I also am sympathetic to the claims that the Muslim Brotherhood was running the country in to a ditch. Unfortunately, the military response seems to have made things much worse. All of this suggests that democratic transitions can be bloody and unstable moments in a country's history. Here are some links...
The last two years saw some major stories in my corner of the blogsphere concerning sexual harassment. Colin McGinn's resignation from the University of Miami saw widespread discussion across the academic interwebs, even if we didn't say much about it. McGinn's case seems not terribly unique in philosophy, as the What's it Like to be a Woman in Philosophy blog has been chronicling for years. Sexual harassment at science-fiction conventions is also an ongoing problem. Genevieve Valentine's treatment at Readercon produced an online firestorm last year. Some of the discomfort with Brian's...
In light of the brouhaha between Chris Christie and Rand Paul over foreign policy, conservative columnist Ross Douthat opined in The New York Times that the Republican Party seems to be missing the sort of realist pragmatists of old that might have mediated between these views. He attributes the realist decline to them being out of step on domestic politics and just not really liked by different factions on foreign policy. He writes: However, I’m doubtful that Christie will ultimately take this kind of split-the-difference tack, because with the eclipse of foreign-policy realism within the...
M. David Forrest, a soon-to-be-assistant-professor of American politics, forwarded the following letter to the "interpretation and methods" listserv. He agreed to let me post it at the Duck. Given the methodological heterogeneity of our readership, I thought it would be of interest. It reads: [I am an American Politics scholar who primarily uses interpretive methods and methodologies (IMM) and recently came off the Assistant Professor job market. Several weeks back I shared some thoughts about my market experiences with Peri (Schwartz-Shea) and Dvora (Yanow), who most of you know. At their...
A claim common among opponents of a treaty ban on autonomous weapon systems (AWS) is that treaties banning weapons don't work - suggesting efforts to arrest the development of AWS are an exercise in futility. Now this claim has been picked up uncritically by the editors at Bloomberg, writing in the derisively titled, "No Really, How Do We Keep Robots From Destroying Humans?": "Bans on specific weapons systems -- such as military airplanes or submarines -- have almost never been effective in the past. Instead, legal prohibitions and ethical norms have arisen that effectively limit their use....