Alex Montgomery I have a new post up at Foreign Policy arguing that "The Bells" - and audience reactions to it - tell us something about American attitudes toward just war theory. A relevant topic with rising tensions w/ Iran, a debate over whether to pardon war...
Every year at this time I receive several queries a day from colleagues, would-be colleagues and students asking me if I'll be "at APSA" - the Annual Conference of the American Political Science...
Many of your Ducks are descending upon DC for the annual APSA conference which is appropriately timed at the beginning of the academic year and the school year.  I know I have been looking forward...
I was going to post about my talk in Toronto on NATO , but now I have a slightly different NATO post to write: a response to this piece by Anne Applebaum proposing that Obama magically fix NATO. ...
In the aftermath of a long war, a new degree of suspicion ensues between two powerful countries that were nominally on the same side…one rattles its sabre, threatening small countries on its borders…the other shores up relations with the very same countries… a tit-for-tat arms race begins, waged with the advantages of recent technological advances…espionage takes the form of a new battleground as the stakes move progressively higher…for the most part the top leaders of each continue to say nice things about each other in public, but a new undertone of tension has become apparent…privately...
How do we know the job market is broken for academics? Because people are willing to spend money hiring advisers. Really. This article documents the costs of being on the market these days. To be clear, this piece is deceptive and unrepresentative. But as a result, it is representative. Huh? How does that make any sense? Because the academic job market is so tough, it is poorly understood, and people then perhaps over-think what it takes to succeed. Plus some stuff has changed, some has not. First, let's talk about the biggest expense: conference travel. In some fields (not...
Good mornin' Duck-o-nauts!  Let's start the week in ... Space (i.e. Asia's Playground)... India is goin' to (orbit) Mars with a launch set for November 2013, only a few years after India landed an unmanned probe on the moon and detected water on the lunar surface. (The US is also sending an atmospheric orbiter to Mars this year.)  India is not exactly new to space; it has had 101 successful space missions but mainly with satellites. The mission to Mars will cost about as much as buying one Boeing passenger airliner.  Yes, India is still poor and beset with numerous problems, but India...
Last week, Naazneen Barma, Ely Ratner, and Steven Weber offered "The Mythical Liberal Order," a provocative update to their earlier article on the world without the West. They sought to puncture certain mythologies about the strength of the liberal order, that it never was a strong as defenders thought: its decline is much exaggerated since there was not much to begin with. Moreover, they seek to offer more convincing and significant evidence that non-Western countries are "routing around" the West through currency swaps and discussion of a new multilateral bank and other actions. Both that...
Who is the most admired woman in the nerd universe? Hmmm. Could it be: If loving Princess Leia is wrong, I don't want to be right. I also don't want to be her brother.
. Happy International Women's Day. Remembering events in Bosnia twenty years ago and how the world was changed. The Guardian's profile of a few voices from around the world. Urvashi Sahni and Xanthe Ackerman offer strategies for action. In my weekend reading, I'll be trying to make sense of some of this week's bizarre events. North Korea ends peace pact and ratchets up the threat. Jeffrey Lewis worries about the next moves Senator Robert Menedez says Congress and the United States must "ensure that North Korea pays a price for its continued reckless behavior." BBC has video of North Korean...
Here is some Thursday morning linkage action: In time for the CITES meeting on the trade in endangered species, scientists released a study that showed a 60% decline in the small forest elephant species in Africa in the last TEN years Meanwhile, news accounts reported on the shadowy networks of criminals involved in the trade of endangered species (see here as well) Scientists reported that they were able to cure a little girl infected with HIVÂ by giving her large doses of a triple cocktail of antiretrovirals at birth; this is only the second reported case of someone known to have the HIV...
This article discusses the importance of doing counter-intuitive work in the social sciences: We love our counterintuitive findings. And for fields such as psychology, they’re almost a necessity.If new conclusions already gel with our beliefs, goes the common refrain, why was precious taxpayer money ever wasted on the study in the first place? (I find the prospect of a society populated by commenters on most social science articles chilling.) Never mind that because our beliefs are not immune to prevailing worldviews, what we find intuitive has almost certainly been shaped by the past...