Jarrod is joined by Daniela Lai and Adam Lerner to talk about the role of big questions in IR scholarship and teaching.
Does IR ask big questions?
read more
Featured
Episode 7: Duckcalls Events Series 1, Solarwinds discussion with Nina Kollars and Mark Raymond
A discussion with Nina Kollars and Mark Raymond about the SolarWinds hack, recorded in March, 2021
Bridging the Other Gap: Approaches for Blending STEM and Social Science Education
The COVID-19 pandemic makes it clear – our students need a blend of science and policy literacy. Transnational challenges with technical dimensions are increasingly common. Pandemic disease, climate...
Is bullying baked into academia?
Recently, David Edelstein and Jim Goldgeier circulated an open letter for signature to address bullying in the profession. The open letter can be found here. So far, there are nearly 100...
More Featured Posts
Learning to Live with Militias in America
This is a guest post by Ariel I. Ahram (@arielahram). Ahram is an associate professor in Virginia Tech’s School of Public and International Affairs and is the author of Proxy Warriors: The Rise and Fall of State Sponsored Militias (Stanford, 2011). A few years ago the possibility that an American president would be complicit as armed supporters attacked members of opposition would have seemed far-fetched. Yet the alliance between president-elect Donald Trump and the so-called ‘alt-right’, a protean alignment of nativists, xenophobes, Christian identarians, and white supremacists, raises this...
When Hell Freezes Over—Will Generals (and Admirals) Stop Global Warming and Bring Peace and Human Rights to the Trump White House?
It now looks like the candidate who boasted that he knew more than the generals will be a President who appoints them and asks their advice. There has been considerable criticism of this from those concerned about a concentration of civilian power in the hands of former military brass. This is well-reasoned, because a pipeline from the Pentagon to the White House potentially gives too much civilian authority to the military and narrows the lens through which policy is made. We ought to look critically at the institutional consequences of appointing flag officers to cabinet office or key...
The Russians Are Coming (for your language too)
Gone are the good old days when I had to explain what the word ‘yarki’ means to my friends and colleagues (for the record, ‘colorful’, not ‘brilliant’). Now I will have to clarify the complexities of planting child pornography into the computers of oppositional leaders thanks to the re-emergence of ‘kompromat’. Why did kompromat, arguably a KGB-developed practice of mining compromising material on politicians and blackmailing them with it, surface again in the media? As Fabian Burkhardt noticed, the word first appeared in the English language with the information wars of the 90s. Moreover,...
No More Vietnams? Reforming the Selective Service
When I was young, I dreamed of Italy. Once in a while, my father would pull out the slide projector and show us pictures from his life on a mountain near Colle Isarco, not far from Italy’s border with Austria. He taught me to speak a little in both Italian and German, which I loved. My father, though, is not Italian, and his sojourn at a mountaintop telecom site (still the only time he’s ever been outside North America) came all-expenses-paid courtesy of the U.S. Air Force, which he joined after being drafted during the Vietnam War. That period of conscription, which ended in 1973, was the...
Why Do People Buy #Pizzagate?
Pizzagate, the conspiracy theory started by alt-right Twitter which alleged that John Podesta's emails exposed some members of the Democratic party as being part of a DC pizzeria-based child-sex ring, has made its way into Russian social networks. Now some people are convinced of the existence of pedophile lobby that ‘rules’ the US, and believe that both ‘lamestream’ media and elites are trying to hush it up. As one Russian LiveJournal user puts it: its’ ‘American internet community versus pedophiles in politics’. Why do people believe that debunked conspiracy theory? Two reasons: the blood...
A Plea for Cease Fire in the New American Civil War, Part I—A Trump Unity Agenda
Before the election, I offered that I would write three posts on bridging the sharp divides that have us in warring camps--one on a unity agenda, the second on changes in the tone of our public discourse, and the third on increased civic engagement. Honesty is the best policy so I’ll start by saying that I did not think President-elect Trump would win. While I’m being honest, I’ll add that I’m a liberal democrat who found Trump’s victory deeply and personally devastating. To make all of this honesty even worse, what I will propose as a Trump unity agenda is largely what most would consider a...
Ice Thin Memory
Usually when news about Russia makes it to American late night shows, Russia either gets hit by a meteorite, or it annexes part of a neighboring country. Either way, it is illustrated by Putin’s bare-chested photograph on a horse. This time, however, neither celestial bodies, nor Putin’s nipples were at stake. Several high-profile newspapers and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah reported on…  an ice-skating dance routine. ‘Wife of Putin’s ally’ [putting aside the whole sexist tradition of defining a woman through her male companion] was widely criticized for her Holocaust-themed ice-dancing...
Femme Fatale
After Donald Trump won the elections in the US, Twitter was abuzz with the picture of potential UN Security Council country leaders that included Theresa May, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Marine Le Pen. So now all eyes are on France and its upcoming presidential elections. The possibility of ‘Frexit’ in case of Le Pen’s win is alarming enough, but Russia is also on the agenda. Russian-French relations have been strained since the beginning of the Ukraine crisis, but have got even worse after President Hollande accused Russia of war crimes in Syria that purportedly prompted...