Erica Chenoweth et al had a great article in the Monkey Cage yesterday about the Lights For Liberty protests. On June 12, Americans turned out in nearly 700 cities to protest the complex of detention camps along the souther border in which migrants, many of them...
So, I got some bad teaching evaluations from last semester (bad by my standards at least. Hell, by anybody's standards). It's kind of thrown me for a loop because I pride myself on being a good...
This is a guest post from Jennifer Hadden, who is an assistant professor at the University of Maryland. She guest blogged on the Duck before on global climate negotiations. She also has a...
It is no secret in the academic IR community that securitization theory, an approach developed in Europe as part of the Copenhagen School of security studies, has struggled to get traction here in...
If you belong to APSA, you probably got the email announcing the last-minute closure of the Ralph Bunche Summer Institute because of the Coburn (left) amendment. Undergraduate programming like this is obviously pretty vulnerable. It doesn’t have the cachet of high-profile, ‘big think’ research. But it does obviously endanger the discipline in the long-term by cutting into our future replacements (almost certainly one purpose of the amendment). It would be no surprise if some of this summer’s bright students got turned off our discipline because of these shenanigans, or missed a seminar or...
I'm passing along some ideas from Brian Matzke, a Ph.D. student in the Department of English at the University of Michigan. Making social rules and expectations explicit is a big part of contemporary classroom management, and this document is a good starting point for other instructors developing their own syllabi or cataloguing their own expectations. This version has been very lightly edited; you can see the original (with comic strip!) here. Etiquette Guidelines for Students Interacting with Instructors Success in any college course is determined by your performance on the graded...
I've learned to limit consumption of Tom Friedman, except when he talks about the Middle East...yesterday his column suggested that the Arab Spring should be renamed in light of recent events...I think he is on to something, but I doubt his suggestion of "The Arab Quarter Century" will fly...my suggestion is the "The Arab Turn", which connotes both the significance of current events in the region and recognition of some kind of new era in the making, but leaves open the outcome...what do you think?
Here is your Thursday Morning Linkage! Algal bloom kills 240 of Florida's 5000 manatees (cause of death: natural toxin) Madonna smacked down by Malawi government after her recent visit Shale gas and methane leaks, greener than coal but by how much? Obama tells donors that the politics of the environment are hard, hints at what he might do on Keystone XL pipeline BP is beyond "Beyond Petroleum," sells wind power interests Nicholas Lemann asks:Â what happened to the environmental movement? New bird flu cases from China: how worried should we be? Tom Bollyky: Why does Gleevec, a leukemia drug...
And I bet that you all thought that I'd completely forgotten.... Robert Farley on the lessons of the Falklands War... for the PLA-N. Adam Elkus ruminates on the relationship between theory and math. Robert Murray: IR Theory and North Korea. Patrick M. Morgan's award-winning article: "The State of Deterrence in International Politics Today" (PDF). The (Proposed) US Global HIV/AIDS budget. Can Islam Karimov's daughter succeed him? And also: Jay Ulfelder is very, very excited about GDELT. Xavier Marquez riffs on another one of these "common human myths? Ecological event!"...
"My main job [as an assistant professor at insert-flyover-university-here] is advising presidential policy on public religious life." I actually heard a Ph.D. tell his neighbor that on an airplane. I know that there might be more worthwhole topics for my first post in months (I haven't been a total slacker, I have been doing some programming), but none is more pressing ... I have made back-to-back trips to conferences (first ISA and then MPSA) this week, and have connected through Atlanta each time, providing me with the rare opportunity to ride the airplane with other political scientists...
My own thinking on the current Korea flap is on The Diplomat. I argue it’s a faux crisis, which promptly got me accused of being an air-head academic in the comment section. Lovely. I was also pleased to respond to Kim Jong Un’s threat that I should leave the country. And I managed not to explode laughing when a reporter asked me point blank on live TV if Kim Jong Un was ‘just bonkers.’ Was itching to say yes to that one actually. Good times… Never waste a missile crisis, right? Anyway, here’s David Kang suggesting the cable and satellite news services are overhyping this thing, a point I...
Despite the lack of an update at its website, I am now the Chair of the International Studies Association (ISA) Theory Section. Obviously, all ISA members should join and contribute $5 to our budget. But the reason for this post is that we've promised public discussion of the wording of our new book award. I've set up a page for the section at the Duck of Minerva, but the comments aren't working. So I'm putting the basic text here and inviting comments. We also need to figure out if we are honoring a "distinguished scholar" next year. Suggestions on both the text of the award and possible...