Will Moore decided to punch out, as he put it. He left behind devastated friends, co-authors and students as well as family. I have been trying to put into words how I feel today. Will was upstaged by his suit I have known Will since I was a visiting assistant...
Dear Mr. Kristof, Since you're getting so much hate mail from political scientists this week, I thought I'd send you a fan letter. I teach international relations at University of Massachusetts. I...
Good morning. Here are your links ... Bilal Sarwary at the BBC gives us a glimpse of Helmand province that is rarely seen. He writes, "This type of checkpost is the real front line. There are poppy...
For some people this has been a very good month, for others, no so much. Tenure (and by proxy promotion) is the thing most American Professors strive for, desire, believe is the crowning moment in...
I'm very much looking forward to attending this year's International Studies Association conference in lovely San Diego. This is partly because I can fight a losing struggle against its declared theme for this year:'Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan famously said, “The medium is the message,” and coined the term “global village.” McLuhan died in 1980, but his insights are even more relevant today. The information environment is drastically different from that of even a decade ago, as new forms of information flows come into existence almost annually.Facebook now has over 500...
<img alt="" galleryimg="no" onload="var downlevelDiv = document.getElementById('bb5de15d-7c15-4871-a2cc-6763366de6e7'); downlevelDiv.innerHTML = "";" src="https://lh5.ggpht.com/-W1vOumSW7Og/T1A4_HIYJyI/AAAAAAAAAGk/26F_nfPYPEE/videof869ee43bf33%25255B4%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" />I guess if you speak a foreign language, you’re a traitorHere were my first, domestic politics thoughts on the GOP debate-run, particularly the competitive, extreme position-taking forced onto the candidates by the audience reactions. But I thought the debates actually...
Why should academics and policymakers prioritize a state's acquistion of "... the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory"? Obviously, this monopoly is fundamental to masking the violence of the state in daily domestic affairs, but what about in areas where that violence cannot be masked under the guise of a neutral, rational-legal state that speaks for the "nation" in the first place? Is a Eurocentric model of the state still an appropriate priority for all territories, particularly in regions which have a long history of embattled states as well as...
<img src="https://lh4.ggpht.com/-kdQcW4Vl7-k/T1A4B7ds90I/AAAAAAAAAGc/qah90Do3fTk/videoc8c44ca00ba6%25255B13%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" style="border-style: none" galleryimg="no" onload="var downlevelDiv = document.getElementById('1f164c0c-2f86-4021-9047-76be574cf4fc'); downlevelDiv.innerHTML = "";" alt="" />Here’s the last one if you haven’t seen it yet So it looks like the GOP debating season is over. Wow. I don’t study American politics, but I can’t remember a marathon run of debates like that ever before. (Can anyone speak to that point,...
Here is part one, where I noted Walt, the Duck, and Walter Russell Mead as the IR blogs I read almost always despite the avalanche of international affairs blogs now. Here are a few more: Martin Wolf: Here’s a grad school education in IPE, op-ed by op-ed, better day-to-day than either Krugman or the Economist. Not being an economist, but facing regular student questions for years about the Great Recession and the euro-zone crisis, I have found Wolf indispensible in explaining what happened in the last 5 years – and without that ‘bankers as masters of the universe’ schtick coming from CNBC,...
If there is one constant to modern social science, it is that you are always under-read. There is always some critical book you missed, some article you never had time for, some classic of which you only read the first and last chapters in grad school. And this is just the modern work immediately relevant to your field. After college you all but gave up on reading the ‘great books’ in the Chicago sense – Plato, Augustine, Mill, Nietzsche, etc. That’s the stuff that really got you interested in social analysis – you’ve still got a marked up copy of Aristotle’s Politics somewhere - but if you...
In reaction to Charli's provocative February 20 post on the constructivist peace, I left a number of questions in comments. Since more people read the blog than read the comments, I thought it was worthwhile to put them on the front page as a separate post. Thus, if you are interested, click through. I've added a few pertinent links as well to create added value for people who already read the original comments.I'm not familiar with the specific studies noted in Charli's post, but do wonder about the scope and interpretation of the data -- especially in regard to the "abusers' peace." 1....
Here is part one, where I noted how much the communist super-idolization of leaders like Ho and Mao weirds me out. Here are a few more social science impressions from our university trip:4. What is it about communist states and concrete? Ech. It is so ugly and awful-looking. And it looks even worse and more out of place in the tropics. Mozambique and Vietnam look like the GDR in the jungle. The German Democratic Republic was architecturally hideous enough with its soulless, modernist-boxy, steel-and-concrete gigantism. Now drop that model into a third world tropical setting, and the outcome...