The basic principles that should guide letters and their RFDs hold across every kind of decisions. However, we need to recognize important differences between, say, a rejection and an R&R. In this post, I lay out my thoughts about letters for the types of...
I was remiss yesterday in failing to note that November 9, 2014 would have been Carl Sagan's 80th birthday. For a former astrophysicist such as myself, it is an opportunity for reflection on the...
Today 25 years ago the Berlin Wall was torn down, one of the most consequential events of the 20th Century, catalyst for the end of the Cold War and freedom for millions stuck behind the Iron...
Last week, the Economist reported on the expanding sway of Christianity in China. While the numbers are difficult to pin down, The Economist reports that some argue that the number of Christians in...
If you are like me, you are pining for your next installment of Game of Thrones (and the Memorial Day week off was cruel, though not as cruel as the torment we have seen of late). In the meantime, I give you your weekly dose of Thursday Morning Dinklage. Top stories this week: Steve Walt puts the flawed but necessary peer review process in perspective Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb's letter to oft-dead Mokhtar Belmokhtar for his unwillingness to be a good team player has been translated and is a classic (I sense a new Sahel version of The Office) Belmokhtar's group pulls off some new...
A handful of links today, but with content. Dan Drezner discusses China, Thucydides, and the limit of metaphor. It strikes me that Dan's buried the lede here. The question isn't whether Thucydides is applicable to the Sino-American relationship, or whether Tuchman is better, but rather why even Chinese IR professors have adopted the tropes of the Western professoriate. After all, China has its very own history from which to draw analogies, as smart scholars like Victoria Tin-bor Hui and David Kang have reminded Western audiences. The history of the Warring States period seems at least as...
Some of our readers might be interested in this. Comes with a €2,500 prize. The GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies, Hamburg, has established itself as a centre of academic and research excellence in Comparative Area Studies (CAS) with a special focus on politics, international relations and economics. The GIGA has decided to establish an award for Best Article in the Field of CAS. The first awards ceremony will take place on 9–10 April 2014 during the international CAS conference “Adapting Institutions: A Comparative Area Studies Perspective”, one of the main activities...
Hopefully, another semester has come to a close for you and you’re catching up on some much needed research/sleep. After I’ve doled out grades for my students, I usually get a nice big stack of evaluations of my teaching abilities, filled out by those very same students who squeaked by with a “C-“in my class. At my previous university, it was the ONLY way my teaching was evaluated; for better or worse, no senior faculty or peers ever evaluated my teaching content, style, or skills in the classroom. A whopping 40% of my annual evaluation came from what my students recorded on bubble-sheets...
The Hong Kong Duck is back! Not much point in having the "best" military R&D in the world if a potential rival can steal your most important designs. A Law of the Sea symposium (and also) at Opinio Juris on "search and rescue operations." LFC on Kennan's opposition to the Vietnam War. Making the most out of Google dirigibles over Africa. Anti-vaccine themes in popular discourse. Jocelyn Cesari looks at France's "peculiar same-sex marriage debate"; Zack Ford summarizes recent anti-gay violence at "demonstrations in Ukraine, Russia, and France." Cranky sociologist reviews left-wing...
Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Tim Dunne. He is Research Director of the Asia-Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect at the University of Queensland and the past editor of the European Journal of International Relations. tl;dr warning: ~2400 words. In a recent lively and provocative post, Stephen Walt argues that liberal imperialists are like ‘neocons’ only more human rights-friendly. They are alike in the sense that both ‘are eager proponents for using American hard power’. And combined, these two sets of protagonists have been responsible for bad foreign policy decisions...
Today is Memorial Day in this U.S., which leads to all kinds of silly debates about whether this holiday celebrates just the dead killed in America's wars or the Veterans as well since there is Veteran's Day in November (which is Armistice Day everywhere else). The other silly debate that seems to occur around this time is about the draft. Karl Eikenberry (former US general and then Ambassador to Afghanistan) and David Kennedy (retired history prof) wrote a NYT op-ed about the state of US civ-mil and what to do about it, including ... bring back the draft. Oy. First, to be clear, there...
Good mornin' ducks. Happy Memorial Day. The US public today, despite strong support for the military, is the least connected to the institution. Only about 0.5% of the population has served on active duty since 9/11 (roughly 9% of the population served in WWII). The FAS revisits the potentially staggering costs of a war with Iran under different scenarios in the wake of the passage of the Iran Threat Reduction and Syria Human Rights Act. Is al-Assad and the new National Defence Force winning the civil war in Syria? (The article has some useful graphics) The US is happy that India has cut...