Scholars of international relations don’t agree on much, but they at least agree that anarchy (th…
Episode 25: The New Hierarchy Studies
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Duck Podcast G&T series episode 1: Power, realism, and the politics of IR Academia
Anne Harrington and Jacqueline (Jill) Hazelton take center stage in the inaugural G&T episode.
The Leaky Pipeline
This piece is written by Bridging the Gap co-Director Naazneen H. Barma, Director of the Scrivner Institute of Public Policy, Scrivner Chair, and Associate Professor at the Josef Korbel...
Why are we so quick to dismiss the UAE-Israel peace treaty?
In September, the UAE and Israel signed "the Abraham Accords," normalizing relations between the UAE and Israel. The Trump Administration presented this as if it was equivalent to the Camp David...
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Clash of the Doctrines
Now that the U.S. presidential race has been whittled down effectively to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, and after Trump’s much anticipated foreign policy speech last week, we now have a Trump Doctrine, a new Clinton Doctrine—different from Bill Clinton’s pro humanitarian intervention doctrine—to contrast with the often misunderstood Obama Doctrine. As foreign policy has begun to feature more prominently in the race for the White House, we can no longer beg the question as to which of these would better serve core U.S. national security interests, not to mention the interests of our...
Five “Don’ts” for Introducing a Female Speaker (And Why This Matters)
This is a guest post by Janina Dill, Assistant Professor at the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics and a Research Fellow at the Center for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on international law and ethics in international relations, specifically in war. She is the author of “Legitimate Targets? Social Construction, International Law and US Bombing." “She may be a small person, but she has big ideas,” states the panel chair by way of introducing one of the most impressive senior scholars in security...
Ben Rhodes, Part the Second: Or, Journalistic Interpolations are Not Evidence
For those of you not on Twitter. FWIW, Samuels' appears to be walking a very fine line in the piece. /1 — Daniel Nexon (@dhnexon) May 6, 2016 Here's his inference from the 'grand deception' of focusing on the 2013-2015 round & critics are seizing upon: 2/ pic.twitter.com/HZeUSEoggj — Daniel Nexon (@dhnexon) May 6, 2016 Here's the *only* supporting evidence he offers from Rhodes — which is not actually from the interview: 3/ pic.twitter.com/CIyRwOEzvC — Daniel Nexon (@dhnexon) May 6, 2016 These are NOT the same argument. One is about trying to 'end cycles of conflict,' the other is about...
The White House Pushes for its Policies, and Other Surprises from Ben Rhodes
It seems that everyone (at least on the political right) is in a tizzy about the "revelations" in David Samuels' New York Times Magazine story on Ben Rhodes. For example, Lee Smith, at the Weekly Standard, headlines "Obama's Foreign Policy Guru Boasts of How the Administration Lied to Sell the Iran Deal." As I'll explain below, that's, at best, massive hyperbole. But what we really learned is that Ben Rhodes has a massive ego—Thomas Ricks is less kind in his assessment. We also learned that Samuels—like any reporter—wants to break big stories. Put the two together, and you come away less,...
Drones Kill More Civilians than Manned Aircraft Do. That’s Because of How We Use Them.
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...
So, You Want to Be a Liberal Arts College Professor: Life in the Liberal Arts edition (Part I)
[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...
Bernie Sanders’ Foreign Policy is Neither Realist, Pacifist, nor Liberal. He’s a Foreign Policy Progressive.
I have a new article up this morning at Washington Post's Monkey Cage, 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). 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...
Restoring Conventional Deterrence in Europe: How to Climb Out of the Joint Security Trap
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...