Robert Cox’s landmark article, “Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Rela…
Episode 32: Social Forces, States, and Clydeside Whisky
read more
Featured
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.
Xymena Kurowska
ymena Kurowska of Central European University joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast. Professor Kurowska grew up in the northern part of Poland, at a time of world and local...
6+1 Questions about Armed Guests: Territorial Sovereignty and Foreign Military Basing
The practice of maintaining a long-term, peacetime military presence in another state (or “sovereign basing”) only developed in the last century. Before World War II, a foreign military presence usually meant one of three things: occupation, colonization, or a wartime alliance. This changed radically in the years after 1945.
More Featured Posts
The Decision Letter, Part II
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 decisions that we made at ISQ. Not all journals use the same categories or mean the same thing. For instance, a (rare) "reject and resubmit" at ISQ meant that we would consider a revised version of the paper as an entirely new submission; at some journals, a "reject and resubmit" is equivalent to "major revisions" R&R. Desk...
The Decision Letter, Part I
Public Domain — From Pixabay For caveats and background, see my introductory post. Editors write a lot of decision letters. At high-volume journals, editors write so many decision letters that it can become a tedious grind. For authors, though, the information communicated in decision letters matters enormously. It can affect their job prospects, salaries, and chances of advancement. Of course, authors, especially in the moment, overestimate the significance of any single journal decision. But receiving a rejection, revise-and-resubmit invitation, or an acceptance can certainly feel like a...
Scary Dragon or Cuddly Panda? Why Role Change Matters for Hegemony in Asia
The following is a guest post by Dr. Daniel Nicholls. Daniel Nicholls is an adjunct professor of IR at ESADE and the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. His research looks at the interplay between relational structures, roles and hierarchy. In an interesting piece on the Japan-South Korea spat in Foreign Affairs, Bonnie S. Glaser and Oriana Skylar Mastro argue that by failing to mediate the dispute between the keystones of its Asian alliance system, the US risks losing regional influence to a fast-moving and wily China. In short, if Washington doesn’t jump in as a relationship counselor,...
What Is . . . and Isn’t . . . a Norm?
The Norm Concept This post, part of the Bridging the Gap channel at the Duck, comes from Michelle Jurkovich, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She is a 2019-2020 Public Engagement Fellow with Bridging the Gap and an alumna of BTG’s International Policy Summer Institute. During 2017-2018, she was an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science and Technology fellow working in the Office of Food for Peace at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). We talk about norms a great deal in international...
Early lessons from a survey on bias in family formation in academia
The following is a guest post by Leah C. Windsor and Kerry F. Crawford. Windsor is a Research Assistant Professor in the Institute for Intelligent Systems at The University of Memphis. Crawford is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at James Madison University. To take their survey, visit: https://tinyurl.com/drparentsurvey This is the first in the series on changing the field of international relations. #IRChange Academic families – especially dual-career spouses – with young children are struggling in more specific and remediable ways than we thought when we first...
Ranking Tenure Candidates? No Thanks
Sunday mornings are for tenure reviews. Huh? I am reading stuff to evaluate a scholar for whether he/she is worthy of tenure. This is a standard part of the tenure process--to have outside scholars read a bunch of a candidate's work and then indicate whether they have made a significant contribution and whether they are likely to continue to do so. As I have written elsewhere, this is a fair amount of work, almost always unpaid. So, I have gotten a bit cranky when I do it these days. Sunday mornings are for tenure reviews. Huh? I am reading stuff to...
Moscow in the Meddle
Between the burning Amazon and burning Siberia, Brexit clustercoitus and Hurricane Dorian, there is still some space in the tired news cycle for the tear gas in Hong Kong and broken limbs in Moscow protests. Elections to the local parliament in Moscow have proved unexpectedly difficult for the ruling vertical: by refusing to register oppositional candidates for made-up reasons, the election committee and the Mayor’s office drastically underestimated mobilisation capabilities of the opposition. Result: over a month and a half of “unsanctioned” protests in the city center, police brutality,...
Pompeo’s New Commission on Unalienable Rights Falls Short, But Represents a Real Opportunity
The following is a guest post by Dr. Ryan M. Welch. Dr. Welch is Assistant Professor at the University of Tampa who specializes in human rights institutions and is a former member of the Maricopa County Human Rights Committee. Recently, the State Department created a human rights commission called the Commission on Unalienable Rights (hereinafter: the Commission). Like an oil industry lobbyist heading the Department of Interior, a climate skeptic atop the EPA, and a charter school advocate running the public education department, most believe this another cynical instance of an institution...