Today is President Putin’s inauguration day and even Avengers couldn’t stop it, as evidenced by the arrested raccoon in the center of Moscow on Saturday during the unsanctioned rally ““He's No Tsar to Us.” For Russia watchers, the Saturday protests probably created a...
This activity comes after students are to have listened to a lecture (slides) about domestic politics helps us understand variation in the likelihood of international conflict. I focused...
At long last, the journal article version* of the research my team conducted on the human security network is published (complete with color-coded tag clouds and network graphs)! International...
It’s almost that time again: National Day of Prayer is tomorrow. It’s a day for us to come together and pray for those who need praying for.[1] Like last year, I have some political science...
As this election is, by many accounts, "too close to call," I've generated different opening paragraphs for November 7. Each, I hope, confirms the retrospective "conventional wisdom." 1. If Romney wins a decisive victory In a surprisingly decisive victory that will draw inevitable comparisons to Ronald Reagan's 1980 defeat of Jimmy Carter, Mitt Romney defied the pollsters and statisticians to become the 45th President of the United States. Barack Obama, perhaps derailed by Hurricane Sandy, failed to overcome a sputtering economy and his own lackluster performance in the first Presidential...
Via reader JW, an exceptional experiment from Yale: In a field experiment conducted during trick-or-treating at Halloween, we find that a visual cue of Michelle Obama prompts almost twice as many children age 9 and over to choose fruit over candy, compared to a visual cue of Ann Romney. This provides evidence that Michelle Obama’s campaign to promote healthy eating has succeeded in influencing behavior. No such evidence was found for children age 8 and below.
As readers might have surmised, a number of the bloggers at the Duck are into the philosophy and history of science. PTJ has written an exceptional book on the philosophy of science in the context of international-relations scholarship. Others of us dabble, with varying degrees of commitment. When PTJ and I were working on "Paradigmatic Faults in International-Relations Theory" I was fortunate to be able to talk Kuhn and Lakatos with Michael Gordin of Princeton University. When I was at Harvard there were some people who were scary brilliant. Michael was one of those guys. He was also one...
If you ever thought that emotion, mythology, and the uterus didn’t matter in foreign policy, reading debates about women in the military should change your mind. I expected some debate to ensue when Foreign Affairs agreed to publish an essay called Let Women Fight in their November/December issue (cough shamelessselfpromotion cough), but I was blown away by the comments posted on a preview of the article in the Daily Beast last week. Sure, many responses to op eds are easily brushed off as rants or individuals blowing off steam, but it is worth looking at a few themes within the responses to...
In my last post, I noted that Hurricane Sandy has finally triggered a vigorous discussion about climate change, prompting much speculation about whether climate change had some role in causing the storm. I expressed some doubt whether this is the right question to ask, as it frequently has triggered feuds among climate analysts about the science of climate change and diverted limited attention from mobilizing people to act. But, let us suppose it would be politically useful to have some greater certainty that extreme weather events like Sandy are related in some fashion to climate change....
In honor of the upcoming election: "James K. Polk" by They Might Be Giants. Hot off the presses: Megan H. MacKenzie's Foreign Affairs article that advocates putting women in combat roles. Jason Fritz unloads in "the rank hypocrisy of veterans on OPSEC." This looks like an interesting short course for the international-relations theory set. Steve Saideman on the "irony" of Fox News as a "true American" foreign import. Brigit Meyer discusses one of my favorite subjects: "secularization and disenchantment" (via 3QD) Henry Farrell has a great post on the (low) value of "insider knowledge."...
I think Duck of Minerva readers will really enjoy this podcast. Lots on the near-future imaginary, technological change, and other topics of interest. From the write up at New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy: Blue Remembered Earth (Gollantz, 2012) takes place roughly 150 years in the future. Climate change, as well as the political and economic rise of Africa, have transformed the planet. Humanity is colonizing the solar system. Geoffrey Akinya, grandson of a visionary businesswoman, cares most about his scientific work with elephants. His sister, Sunday, pursues the life of an artist...
This is a guest post by Amelia Hoover Green (Drexel University), Dara Kay Cohen (Harvard Kennedy School) and Elisabeth Jean Wood (Yale University). See also Megan H. MacKenzie's post and Andrew Mack's reply. tl;dr notice: 3,608 words The Human Security Report (HSR) released last week has attracted considerable attention in both the news media and the blogosphere (the debate is collected here), mostly related to its assertion that wartime sexual violence may be on the decline globally. It is an attention-grabbing claim that is no more supported by data (indeed, somewhat less supported by...