Back in 2019, Uri Friedman wrote that we “find ourselves—as you will have heard in the corridors …
Episode 31: Great Balls of Power
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(De-)globalisation and International Order
Whenever we talk about the liberal international order, we actually also talk about globalization. The former promoted international trade and financial liberalization , the spread of democracies,...
Some Quick Notes
Happy belated New Year! After a rather chaotic December – and lots of work on the backend of this site – we're getting ready to kickstart happenings here at the Duck. We've got a few posts and a...
Whisk(e)y and Epistemic Pluralism: A Quack-and-Forth (Part I)
This is the first instalment of a new series of interviews on Duck of Minerva entitled Quack-and-Forths.
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Russians Love Their Children Too
Sting said it best What kind of questions do you usually expect from a Town Hall meeting in the US? Healthcare? Climate change? Pensions? Schools? Roads? You would be surprised, but these are also the kind of questions journalists asked President Putin last Thursday at his annual presser (his 15th one, no less). Apart from the recurrent theme of the Great Patriotic War, it was your run of the mill, banal Q & A session; just instead of concerned citizens you have a room full of 1895 journalists from Russia and abroad with varying level of sanity and servility. The range was big...
The Same but Different: US vs UK Higher Education
Four years ago I accepted a job at a university in the UK. When I took the job I didn’t think a whole lot about how working in the UK might differ from my previous academic posts in the US. I’m an American, and though I have British friends who work at UK universities--one of whom warned me “not to be fooled by the fact that we speak the same language”--I was woefully underprepared for just how distinct the two higher education systems are. Brits and Americans do speak the same language, but there are significant differences in their use of terminology. It’s not just that we use different...
Chain-ganging in reverse? Gulf states and US hostility towards Iran
I had a piece in the Washington Post's "Monkeycage" over the weekend, which you can read here. I noted that many worry Saudi Arabia and the UAE will pull America into war with Iran. But it actually looks like they're the ones restraining us. The piece was inspired by the famous "chain-ganging" dynamic in IR scholarship, but there was little discussion of that as it was geared towards a broader audience, so I wanted to expand here. I suspect most readers of this site had to read Christensen and Snyder's "Chain gangs and passed bucks" at some point. In case you didn't, the argument is...
Lessons from Radicalization Narratives on Social Media
This is a guest post from Dr. Sybille Reinke de Buitrago, who is a Researcher and Project Manager of “VIDEOSTAR – Video-based Strategies Against Radicalization” at PolAk Nds, the Academy of Police Science and Criminology, Germany. Her research focuses on processes of identity, perception, emotions and discourse in security policy and international relations. With the multitude of ‘stuff’ anyone can say online, why does it matter what someone says? It depends. When it comes to extremists posting content, we should be concerned, because spreading hatred online can incite actual violence....
Agent. Foreign Agent
Warning! According to the law that the Russian parliament passed yesterday, this post might need to be prefaced with a disclaimer that the following text has been compiled by a foreign agent. An individual can be labeled as a “foreign agent” in Russia if they (1) distribute information, and (2) receive funds from sources outside Russia. I am ticking both boxes here, even as an academic working at a university, and the law intentionally left the “information spreading” extremely broad: you can literally post something on social media. It would be up for the Justice Ministry and the Foreign...
IR, it’s time to talk about what the “multiple comparisons issue” really is
As a reviewer and recipient of reviews, I've noted a recent trend among IR papers. A study uses cross-national data with regression analysis, and runs multiple models with different variables or sub-sets of the data. Sometimes the results are consistent, sometimes they aren't. But often a reviewer will object to the study's validity, pointing to the "multiple comparisons" issue. Multiple comparisons can be a real problem in quantitative IR studies, but I worry we're mis-diagnosing it. What do I mean? Imagine we're writing a paper on interstate conflict. We could measure conflict onset,...
Non-Academic Career Paths: The Dirty Secret of Academia?
(Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images) It is a truth universally acknowledged that the academic job market is tough. Faculty openly warn political science PhD students that there are very few tenure-track jobs available, that they will be competing for those few positions against their most talented and accomplished peers, and that multiple publications and the imprimatur of an Ivy League school have become de facto pre-requisites for the top jobs. The academic job market has changed so rapidly that first-year professors often boast more publications than their tenured senior peers. From...
Oh Say Can You Say
You never know when IR is going to bite you in the ass. One minute you are reading a children’s nursery rhyme and the other you realize that the spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Ministry Ms. Zakharova read it too, but decided to use it in foreign policy discourse. The rhyme in question is by a Soviet children’s writer Samuel Marshak, a Soviet Dr. Seuss, if you will: Don’t you stand too close to me I’m a tiger, not a pussy Yes, pussy has the same Russian translation and it has both meanings, the one that Marshak used back in the day denoted just a cat, but Ms. Zakharova built a whole...