Professor Carla Martinez Machain joins the Hayseed Scholar Podcast. Professor Machain talks about growing up in Mexico, specifically outside of and then also in Mexico City, the schools she went to, her interests, doing Model UN and visiting The Hague during an...
Professor Julie Kaarbo (U. of Edinburgh) discusses role theory, the relationship between FPA and IR theory, and a new project she is calling Breaking Bad. As always thanks go to Steve Dancz (https://stevedancz.com) for our theme music.
Professor Julie Kaarbo discusses Foreign Policy Analysis.
I'm working on a new project about the use of religion in power politics (part of which I'll be presenting "at" APSA this week). I'm finding good evidence, but the framing is tricky. Religion as a...
At Foreign Policy, CFR's Micah Zenko has examined the best civilian casualty data available for both manned airstrikes and drone strikes between 2009-2015 and concluded, pretty damningly, that "Drones Kill More Civilians Than Pilots Do." According to the best publicly available evidence, drone strikes in non-battlefield settings — Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia — result in 35 times more civilian fatalities than airstrikes by manned weapons systems in conventional battlefields, such as Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. There are sound arguments that can be made in favor of U.S. drone strikes, but...
[Note: This is the first of two guest posts on life in the Liberal Arts Colleges from Sarah Stroup and Amy Yuen, both Associate Professors of Political Science, Middlebury College] Job market season is fast approaching, but information about those jobs can be scarce. For those on the market, just starting a liberal arts job, or just curious, we offer a little insight from two women recently tenured at a liberal arts institution. Elaborating on prior Duck posts here and here, we first offer a snapshot of research in the liberal arts and later offer a few tips for job applicants. These...
I have a new article up this morning at Washington Post's Monkey Cage, Â responding to those who have previously tried to classify Bernie Sanders as a "pacifist" (Krauthammer who calls his view "part swords-into-plowshares utopianism, part get-thee-gone isolationism") or alternatively as a "realist" (Katrina vanden Heuvel , likening Sanders' to Obama vis a vis Clinton's more hawkish liberal internationalism). Â Many have argued he actually doesn't have a foreign policy position. I argue Sanders' vision has been hard to understand and articulate because it defies conventional labels. And it's...
Russia is currently riding high on the geostrategic landscape, despite a trove of domestic economic woes that stem partly from Western sanctions. But Vladimir Putin has successfully wagged the dog and distracted Russians from this by illegally annexing Crimea by force, occupying eastern Ukraine with a proxy force upheld by Russia, and successfully keeping the Assad regime in force in Syria with a surprise intervention that has not only sent cruise missiles through an airspace with U.S. aircraft in it, but also wiped out the efforts on behalf of the anti-regime rebel forces by Western...
This is a guest post by Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham (@kgcunnin), Associate Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland. Foreign Policy recently published our article on women and the tenure process in International Relations. The article centers on the challenges women face and offers some suggestions on how to manage them for pre-tenure women based on our experiences. We conclude the article, in part, with a call to allies (i.e. people who are not, or are no longer, affected by these biases or are in a position to address them). Here, I offer 8 ways that such...
On April Fool's Day, Presidential Candidate Bernie Sanders did an interview with the New York Daily News, perceived by many to have been a botched performance.  Yesterday, the New York Daily News followed up with a piece entitled "Bernie Sanders Doesn't Know Enough About Foreign Policy, Pros Say."  (The 'pros' cited  were not some representative sample of beltway illuminatis but rather various Clinton foreign policy advisers who will reportedly be circulating a letter saying as much in the next days.) As an IR educator I'm delighted that foreign affairs is looming large in a national primary...
I’ve been wanting to write a Duck post about the experience of a woman with visible minority status in IR for quite some time now. I was waiting for the right moment. So thanks to the American Political Science Association (APSA), the professional association for US-trained political scientists, the moment has come. Yesterday morning, an email came from a friend with a screenshot. The screenshot showed an attractive Asian woman in a frilly top who looks like she’s having a good time looking into the camera. I was confused. Then I read the blurb next to it: this was a promotion from...
This is a guest post by Theo McLauchin (@TheoMcLauchlin), Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Université de Montréal When is a norm not a norm? I ask this question when I read Colin Elman and Arthur Lupia’s vigorous defense of the Data Access & Research Transparency (DA-RT) initiative in APSA’s Comparative Politics section newsletter. I think Elman and Lupia try to have it both ways. Their piece argues, first, that journals need to adopt norms of openness. It then argues, in defense of DA-RT against a series of concerns that it will bring the editorial hammer down on many...