A colleague asked me if there will be war between the US and North Korea. I said maybe, which is pretty damned scary, given the likely consequences. Why am I worried? Basically for two reasons that intersect in bad ways, besides the Trumpiness and KJU-ness factors:...
Yesterday, I suggested that there is little the US/NATO could do about the Russian intervention in Ukraine. That still is very much true. Obama's statement referred to costs--that this would cost...
*this is a guest post by Konstantinos Travlos, currently a Visiting Assistant at Georgia Southern, who writes on international conflict and history. The arguments presented below are based on past...
The only thing scarier than Godzilla? A scared Walter White (Bryan Cranston). This preview is most exciting trailer in a while And, to pass the time, see The Lego Movie as Everything Is...
Here is an answer to Jon Western’s good question. Here is Steve Walt saying nice things about Ron Paul, and Layne has a nice recent piece in the National Interest, and another at ISQ, about looming US retrenchment. Earlier I argued that I think lots of people in IR now both expect and want some measure of US pullback. The argument is pretty well-known by now – empirically, the US is doing more than it can afford, like the Iraq war (trillion dollar deficits and ‘overstretch’); normatively, we are violating far too many of our liberal values against a comparatively minor terrorist threat...
This is a cross-post from my solo blog, Dart-Throwing Chimp.A few days ago, Sean Langberg blogged about a subject that's long been a pet peeve of mine: how we classify countries when we try to talk about the international system, and the labels we apply to the resulting groups. I thought I'd take the cue to air my grievances on the topic and make a couple of simple suggestions.Taxonomies require organizing principles, and the kernel of the classification system Americans usually use in international politics comes from modernization theory. Modernization theory's core idea is...
I'd write a lengthy comment on this, but with my new administrative responsibilities, I have a full day of meetings on liberal arts assessment and impact -- oh, and some kind of silly discussion on the instrumentalization of education and the vocational turn. Whatever. I'll just say that this should take care of my presentation at new faculty orientation next month.... From Department of Omnishambles: Karl Marx's end of year department assessment:ht: Sherrill Stroschein
With Obama's proposed $487bn cuts in defense spending over the next ten years and the potential for another $500bn in cuts through sequestration set to kick in next January if Republicans and Democrats fail to reach the grand bargain compromise on the budget, lots of folks are now harping about the looming threat to American national security if the cuts take hold. Earlier this month, General Joseph F. Dunford Jr., assistant commandant, U.S. Marine Corps concluded that: “We have a tendency to view sequestration as a budget issue, but it’s really not a budget issue. It’s a re-ordering of our...
Yeah, I don’t really know either. I always hear the expression ‘SSCI’ thrown around as the gold standard for social science work. Administrators seem to love it, but where it comes from and how it gets compiled I don’t really understand. Given that we all seem to use this language and worry about impact factor all the time, I thought I would simply post the list of journals for IR ranked by impact factor (after the break).I don’t think I ever actually saw this list before all laid out completely. In grad school, I just had a vague idea that I was supposed to send my stuff to the same...
I'm totally not bitter that Tom Friedman'selementary correlations have 165citations on Google Scholar!Kindred Winecoff, who is both very smart and possessed of good taste in linking, discusses the value of social science.Winecoff discusses a recent splenetic venting by a philosopher claiming that social science has no role to play in policy debates, unlike physics or biology. I am unaware of any particular policy implications that flow obviously from any hard science. True, the atom bomb matters for policy, but the fact of the atomic bomb does not tell us what it means for international...
This video is part of an advocacy strategy launched by a new NGO, Article36, whose focus is the humanitarian control of weapons technology. The organization takes its name from the provision in the 1977 Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions that requires governments to consider the humanitarian impacts of new weapons.Article 36 operates from a principle that practical, policy and legal controls over weapons should be founded on publicly transparent and evidence-based analysis. Such controls should aim for prevention of unintended, unnecessary or unacceptable harm, and should be open...
This is me with Rick Allen, the drummer for Def Leppard who lost his arm in the 1980s but retooled his drum kit and life to adjust to his injury. He now runs the Raven Drum Foundation, which focuses on helping veterans with PTSD and other mental and physical injuries heal as they return home. Through drumming. Pounding the hell out of something and not someone seems like a brilliant idea. It inspired me to write a post on the virtues of heavy metal. And it makes me look cool to people who like “Pour Some Sugar on Me,” which I am sure is a huge part of the clientele of this blog. That’s...