According to conventional wisdom, Disney’s Andor is the best Star Wars narrative in years. Political scientists seem to agree. Dan Drezner speaks for many when he writes that the show's "writing is stellar," its "locations...
Aletta Jacobs. Raise your hand if you have never heard her name! In our neck of the tulip fields, however, she is a celebrated professional: she was the first woman to be officially enrolled and...
Photo courtesy of the Negative Psychologist. When sharing unpopular findings, what obligations (if any) do scholars have when policymakers do not care to hear the message? This is a guest post...
Photo courtesy of the Guardian UK. When engaging with policy audiences and organizations, how can one be truthful when telling the whole truth may be counterproductive? This post is part of an...
It's always exciting to see articles on pop culture gracing the pages of mainstream political science journals. And it's always good to see international relations scholars being encouraged to engage more deeply with questions of gender in the course of their teaching. This issue of PS: Political Science and Politics gives us both: an article by Rebecca Susan Evans, taking Daniel Drezner to task for excluding feminist theories of international politics from his 2011 Theory of International Politics and Zombies: [Drezner's] light-hearted use of popular culture appeals to students, who...
Tomorrow, the NATO summit in Warsaw starts. What do we expect, other than jet-lagged Steve being more incoherent than usual? Lots of decisions to be announced, none to be made. These summits are akin to academic conferences--events that force folks to do the work. So, all of the work to come to agreements, make commitments, draft talking points has been done. Now, it is about announcing them. The big decision--a persistent presence. Two years ago, many allies were reluctant to provoke Russia with a long-lasting deployment of troops to the Baltics and Poland. The old agreement was...
British elites have been wondering for decades whether the UK still had clout on the global stage, and now they know: indeed, the country has an outsized influence on world affairs. But what a way to find out, sowing instability far and wide and suffering a never ending series of self-inflicted wounds. It is tragedy bordering on farce. And none other than Vladimir Putin is having the last laugh. The UK is counting the costs of this fateful vote: in the plummeting value of the pound and large-scale stock market losses. Foreign direct investment in the UK will dramatically dwindle;...
We will have much, much time to ponder and study what happened yesterday... whether it was the weather that made the difference in London, why Cameron was such an idiot, and on and on. I have a few quick reactions guided by and due to my faith in confirmation bias! While I am kind of surprised by the results, I should not be as I co-authored a book that argued that individuals and leaders will often embrace xenophobia for its short term allure despite the great costs to the country. That is why we named the book: For Kin or Country: Xenophobia, Nationalism, and War (now available in an...
The common understanding in military circles is that the more data one has, the more information one possess. More information leads to better intelligence, and better intelligence produces greater situational awareness. Sun Tzu rightly understood this cycle two millennia ago: “Intelligence is the essence in warfare—it is what the armies depend upon in their every move.” Of course, for him, intelligence could only come from people, not from various types of sensor data, such as radar signatures or ship’s pings. Pursuing the data-information-intelligence chain is the intuition behind the...
Hi, Ducks! It’s me, Amanda. It’s been a long time. I’ve not blogged in awhile. There were many reasons for the break. First, it was a busy spring: I finished up being the ISA Program Chair, got a new position I am excited about, and continued working on projects that I love. It’s also been a very sad spring. In fact, it was a pretty sad year at the University of Missouri, where I’ve worked for the past 4 years. Mizzou faced a season of growth, some of it which I was super supportive of. In August, I marched with graduate students when their health insurance was taken away (with less...
This has been going around: Why is this such a dumb counterfactual? Let me count the ways: Unlike parliamentary elections, individual voters could not vote for the full range of candidates--they voted in either the Democratic process or the Republican process Unlike parliamentary elections, the primary/caucus processes in the US were not simultaneous but sequential. Which meant that folks voting later had few choices and were reacting to the outcomes of the previous primaries/caucuses Turnout? Primaries have lower turnout than general elections. In primaries, the most passionate tend to...
As the summer is heating up, all the world’s eyes are on Britain. And that really is saying something for us Americans, what with the wild ride that Donald Trump is taking us all on. But even here, eyes are rapidly averting to the mother country and the high stakes of the debate as to whether it should remain a valued member of the European Union (EU) or leave. And now with this tragedy, the stakes are even higher. Apparently the eyes of the British were fully on the presidential campaign here as well, til recently. Not only did the UK Parliament debate whether to bar Mr. Trump from entering...