It’s our first “actual” installment of Whiskey & IR Theory in Space! We discuss Star Trek: Th…
Episode 30: A Long, Strange Trek
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Featured
Reparations in the Wake of the US Withdrawal from Afghanistan
Though unlikely to happen any time soon, recent calls for the US to pay reparations to the Afghan people provide an opportunity to reflect on the complexities of reparations and global justice.
The Promise and Peril of Public-Facing Scholarship
Paul Musgrave concludes the “Lab Leaks” symposium by engaging with his interlocutors and reflecting on the challenges faced by political science in an era of public-facing scholarship.
They Blinded Them With Science
Musgrave’s identification of dangerous ideas is correct, but his metaphor risks entrenching the fundamental problem: the (inevitable) weaponization of “scientific objectivity.”
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The Implications of 5,000 troops to Colombia
The following is a guest post by Carla Martinez Machain, Michael Allen, Michael E. Flynn, and Andrew Stravers. One week ago, National Security Adviser John Bolton appeared at a White House briefing holding a note pad with the phrase “5,000 troops to Colombia” written on it. This occurred in the context of rising tensions between the U.S. and the Maduro government in Venezuela after the U.S. recognized opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the legitimate leader of Venezuela. Since then, there has been much speculation about how likely a deployment is to happen and what it means for the possibility...
Hey, NYT, we need to talk.
I know, democracy dies in darkness (sorry, WashPo put it better) and we need good journalism, but what you publish in the Opinion Section often does not qualify as journalism, like, at all. I am not even talking about “Intellectual Dark Web” (which is neither intellectual, nor dark, but maybe web) or blatant climate denialism; you seriously need a Russia bullshit detector. Because so far, Russia articles are mostly botched Cyrillic wrapped in a cliché inside an Orientalist talking point. The latest “scary Putin/racist nonsense/KGB/italicized Russian words” piece grazed your pages yesterday...
Under Pressure
Somewhat cranky and slightly under the weather Putin graced the foreign journalists with his presence for almost 4 hours. Starting right off the bat with some optimistic economic indicators (that he used to be able to juggle without any papers), the conference progressed with its predictable pace and predictable plot points: a bunch of questions on economy, token booed Ukrainian question, some dad jokes and good tsar, bad boyars excuses. There was no panache, pizazz or punch. Putin is tired (at some point he was off by 20 million when talking about the Russian population) and his...
Aid and Diplomacy, Not Tear Gas: How to Address the Central American Migrant Crisis
On Sunday, the US Border Patrol fired tear gas into Mexico at migrants, including children, attempting to enter the US near the San Ysidro border crossing between Tijuana and San Diego. The use of a chemical weapon banned in war against families rightly provoked widespread condemnation (Border Patrol agents also used pepper spray against migrants in 2013, fired tear gas and pepper spray into Mexico in 2007, and have killed rock throwers at the border in the past). Migrants attempting to enter the US are frustrated by the Trump administration’s restriction of the process of seeking asylum, a...
Writing Wednesday: a tense dilemma
Yesterday I avoided Twitter almost entirely. I went to bed early last, and am only now looking at the key results in the pre-dawn hours. But since it may have been a late night for most readers of the Duck, we’ll keep things short today. I am heading off to the ISSS-IS conference at Purdue this weekend. If any readers are attending, feel free to contact me and maybe we can grab a coffee. You can Tweet at me (@lukemperez) either publicly, or privately (I will open direct messages on Thursday evening.). In the meantime, I wanted to talk about writing in tenses. It turns out, writing about...
Academic Smothering. Part II.
To illustrate this post, I would love to put that cute stock photo of a woman dressed in a taupe formal suit holding an adorable baby in a diaper, but it is just wildly unrealistic. For starters, the baby is horribly underdressed and the suit would have been covered in drool/spit-up/mysterious orange food rests in mere seconds. FYI, stock photo editors, working on a computer with a baby on your lap is also not an option, because in the end there will be one, and it will not be your computer. Guilt ridden and severely sleep deprived (and by “severely” I mean no sleep stretches longer than 3...
Writing Wednesday: Roadblock
I am at roadbloack in my book proposal. This is normal, insofar as most writing projects will hit roadblocks from time to time. But I wanted to take a quick moment and unpack what it is, and note that a roadblock is different than writer’s block. Writer’s block is a condition of not being able to think of what to write. We are all familiar with writer’s block, even the kind that is really just procrastination masquerading as writer’s block. But the genuine species occurs when the mind—because of fatigue, lack of preparation, distraction from life or politics—cannot focus on the immediate...
What makes international order, liberal?
Over the weekend IR Twitter was abuzz with both the Red Sox winning the world series and a multi-threaded discussion on liberal international order. Regarding the former I have very little to say except that I think Boston baseball might be overrepresented in academe (not just in political science), and that this over representation likely tracks with the clustering of elite schools in New England. But on the latter, there is much more still to be said about international order. Paul Post (@profpaulpoast) has the master summary for the twitter scholars. While I enjoyed reading up on the...