The following is a guest post by Dani Nedal, PhD Candidate at Georgetown University and Predoctoral Fellow at Yale University. The surprising political ascent of Donald Trump has prompted two contradictory reactions. One is the impulse to declare Trump, and...
Digital Media and Human Security At Lawfare Blog, Jean Marie Simon's review of Robert Nickelberg's Afghanistan: A Distant War explores the role of digital photography in constructing wartime...
For the last few years in particular, there has been a marked increase in the number of sessional, casual, teaching-only, adjunct, fixed term, temporary job 'opportunities' listed and circulated in...
I know book reviews bore everyone, but the journal where I published this doesn’t post electronic versions of book reviews. So I thought this would be a good place to put it for internet...
The Canard "All the fake news that's fit to print" ---Earth The globe is suffering from a sudden decline in the volume of oxygen, sending world leaders scurrying to sustain life on earth. Although scientists recognize that there could be any number of reasons, such as increases in pollution and CO2, they believe that the drop is too steep to be explained by these gradual processes. Instead they are focusing their suspicions on the recent publication of Theories of International Politics and Zombies by Daniel Drezner, which is sucking all of the oxygen out of the earth. Since its publication,...
Rodger's post about the commercial success of Dan Drezner's Theories of International Politics and Zombies joins a long line of fellow Ducks' quacking about this book. I've been a part of the conversation, too, but I can write about the book from a perspective that I think is unique: I've just finished teaching an introductory course where I assigned the book. (Hence my complete lack of posting over the past several weeks.) In other words, not only have I read it, I've seen whether undergrads get anything from it.The verdict is clear: Zombies is a great complement for any introductory...
Can any readers here at the Duck direct me to the exact quote of Dean Acheson (I believe it was), who said something along the lines of 'nine tenths of foreign policy is managing the domestic ability to have a foreign policy' or something like that. It was his argument that domestic politics and coalition-building was paramount.Thanks!
Emperor Bahadur Shah IISource: Wikimedia CommonsThe din of the Great Rebellion of 1857 will continue to echo into our era, marred as it is by ongoing wars and insurgencies in Muslim lands. I believe that a careful study of those events are pertinent for American and European students of global politics today as they attempt to contextualize the challenges to American military might and Western cultural hegemony continuously pulsating onto the global stage from the remote corners of South Asia. A chronicle of 1857 is also useful to understand the fragility of a multicultural society in the...
A hypothesis: Pirates, hackers, and terrorists are perennial actors in international relations. They will never be permanently defeated; the frontier will never be permanently settled.The underlying material reason that these actors exist is actually quite simple. Each of these (Weberian) ideal type actors emerges as a consequence of the (proto-capitalist or industrial-capitalist) overproduction and networking of standardized technologies. [I am considering them as separate types even though they may overlap in practice.] Overproduction and networking creates vulnerabilities as access is...
E-waste in ChinaPhoto Source: GreenpeaceDemanufacturing is the process of disassembling, recycling, remanufacturing, or refurbishing outdated industrial and consumer products, particularly electronics (i.e. e-waste management, asset recovery, or urban mining) but also including activities such as shipbreaking, automobile shredding, devulcanization of rubber tires, etc. The tail end of the capitalist industrial production process was traditionally relegated to developing countries in Asia, Latin America, and Africa as part of a broader ruthless and neo-racist practice of relocating polluting...
While rereading Kipling's 1894 classic The Jungle Book, I began to think about the curious ways in which the author constructed the relations between communities of animals in the jungle.  Here are a few observations:1. The jungle is neither anarchic nor Darwinian in Kipling's narrative. It is in fact best understood as an interspecies society governed by a set of laws. To this extent, it seems to mirror the international society tradition. In Kipling's narrative, the laws are universal, but require an acknowledgment of sovereignty -- the laws must be articulated in the tongue and mannerism...
Last week I had the great pleasure of visiting Boston and Washington DC.During this academic junket research-related visit, sparkling conversation was had with some of the liveliest minds on foreign policy in the US, including the established heavy-hitters Andrew Bacevich and Edward Luttwak, as well as some of the sharpest younger thinkers around including the hawkish idealist and internationalist David Adesnik, the sardonically skeptical Dan Nexon from here at the Duck, and one of the most astute observers of Afghanistan-Pakistan, Christine Fair.The subject of Israel ran like a razor-sharp...