Today we begin the Bridging the Gap "Book Nook," a series of short videos describing new books by scholars in the BTG network. For the first entry, our very own Brent Durbin discusses his book, The CIA and the Politics of US Intelligence Reform (Cambridge, 2017). (We...
This sixth activity comes after students are to have listened to a lecture (slides) about trust and exploitation (see also this post). I asked the students to make more or less the same decision...
It’s been a big and extremely depressing week for the rights of sexual minorities. Despite some minor victories in Texas and Arizona Governor Jan Brewer’s veto, anti-gay bills remain on the agenda...
This duck is a bit under water these days. We've reached the mid-semester pre-spring break moment of high activity and low energy (warm weather and SXSW beckon). In the meantime, I've flagged a few...
David Birtley's to-die-for posts chronicling HBO's deviations from the Song of Ice and Fire book series get longer each week over at Wired.Some fans are annoyed at the significant and at times random plot innovations in Game of Thrones (in Season 2 Tywin has come off as a loving grandfather, Arya is killing all the wrong characters, and Dany's dragons have mysteriously vanished!)But I actually think this is nothing short of brilliant precisely because it solves one of the key issues plaguing the series: the spoiler problem.You see, every week the latest episode is disected in the fan...
Now that Don't Ask Don't Tell (DADT) has been removed, does this mean that women are next on the equality/integration agenda?The answer to this question seemed to be yes, when this week when the Pentagon announced the removal of restrictions for some 14,000 military jobs that were previously closed to women within the forces due to their proximity to combat. Understandably, there has been a great deal of discussion as to how the removal of DADT could pave the way for the removal of the combat exclusion for women. But are these comparisons between DADT and the combat exclusion for women...
Now that this academic year’s loose ends are wrapped up, it is time to refocus attention on the important topic of norm development around autonomous weapons. Fortunately for my case study there is much developing on this front, in addition to developments in adjacent but (I argue) distinct issue areas like drones.Lawfare Blog has been putting forth considerable new materials related to this debate in recent days, notably a working paper series. I’ll probably react to a number of these papers as I find time to read them; but for now I’ll note another new paper Ken Anderson and Matthew...
This genre is growing on the Duck, so here are are a few more thoughts before you take the PhD plunge. Enjoy your last summer to read as you choose, without following a peer reviewer or a syllabus. Such lost bliss… Generally speaking, yes, I like being an academic. I like ideas and reading. I like bloviating at length. The sun is my enemy, and exercise bores me. I would really like to be a good writer/researcher. Including grad school, I’ve been doing this now for 15 years, so clearly I could have switched. I am committed. But there are at least 7 things I didn’t see back in my 20s when I...
<img alt="" galleryimg="no" onload="var downlevelDiv = document.getElementById('000902d5-7b3b-4c9c-b77d-2a0f6080ed33'); downlevelDiv.innerHTML = "";" src="https://lh4.ggpht.com/-xHchAHKaTKA/T6nywRxtfXI/AAAAAAAAALg/2rX2oBbeHk4/video6cf4c2596412%25255B7%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" />Greatest Movie Line Ever on Academia: “How the Social Scientists Brought Our World to the Brink of Chaos” Hah!If academia’s taught me anything taught me, it’s that the real world is flawed, not theory, and that facts should change for me, not the other way around. As...
I am concluding a semester-long experiment in incorporating a theory/policy writing simulation of sorts into my doctoral level "Human Security" seminar. This struck me as important both because my own doctoral training left me unprepared for writing for practitioners, and because the divergent socialization of academic professionals into scholarly versus non-scholarly writing has been cited as a key impediment to successful communication with those to whom our ideas and knowledge could conceivably matter.In fact since "human security" is both an academic field and a policy domain this...
My new book, The Global Right Wing and the Clash of World Politics, has recently been published by Cambridge University Press. It is available on Kindle for $12.10, Nook for $14.74, and as a paperback for $21.59. For a free chapter, chapter excerpts, contents, and more please visit my website. The Global Right Wing explores the vibrant world of conservative activism. It examines how America's National Rifle Association (NRA), its Christian Right, and many other right-wing groups have shed their parochialism to become powerful international players. They now join their ideological...