In 2014, John Mearsheimer authored a Foreign Affairs article in which he blamed that year’s Ukrai…
Episode 22: So a Deputy Foreign Minister and an Academic Realist Walk into a Bar…
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Featured
A War On … Something?
This is a guest post by Linda Monsees who works as a Post-Doctoral Researcher at Goethe University Frankfurt and is the author of Crypto-Politics. After wars on drugs, Christmas and everything in...
Protecting Civilians Through Responsible Scholarly Engagement (Vacation Planning Edition)
Recently I highlighted Korbel's new Responsible Engagement Institute, an important innovation in our profession. I shouted this out in the context of my own concerns with survey experiments that...
Seeing Israel and Palestine Up Close
I just came back from eight days in Israel and Palestine, as I participated in a program, Academic Exchange, that has already taken something like 600 scholars (mostly IR but also other political...
More Featured Posts
Privacy, Secrecy & War: Emperor Rogers and the Failure of NSA Reform
On November 3, Britain’s head of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) published an opinion piece in the Financial Times, noting that technology companies, such as Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, (and implying Google and Apple), ought to comply with governments to a greater extent to combat terrorism. When tech companies further encrypt their devices or software, such as what Apple has recently released with the iPhone 6, or what WhatsApp has accomplished with its software, GCHQ chief Hannigan argues that this is tantamount to aiding and abetting terrorists. GCHQ is the sister...
Friday Nerd Blogging: Princess Bride FTW
Check out this set of tweets tying together feminism and Princess Bride. My guess is that you check out #feministprincessbride you will find many more. The movie keeps on giving.
Some Book Publishing Tips
Yesterday, I was part of a panel at Carleton organized to provide other profs/students with suggestions about how to get their stuff published in book form. The Canadian process is different from the American process, so I spent my ten minutes on the lessons I learned from my experiences with American publishers. What did I say? Read stuff for style, not just content. If you want to know how to write a good book that is publishable, notice the books you like and how they are written, not just what they say. One of the panelists discussed how many different kinds of books there are:...
Historic Bilateral Climate Agreement Between the US and China
Here was my Tweet the other day. Today we have an answer. Tweeps, best case scenario on climate coming out of APEC? — Josh Busby (@busbyj2) November 7, 2014 If you went to bed early on Tuesday night, you might have missed some very big news out of Obama-Xi meeting in Beijing, other than announcements on trade and regional security. I'm talking about the potentially momentous bilateral agreement on climate change where China announced for the first time a date -- "around 2030" -- for peak greenhouse gas emissions and the United States announced a 2025 emissions reduction target. This is big...
Death Counts and War Commemoration
Among the various things I've read in the run-up to Veterans Day / Remembrance Day is this article by University of Auckland's Tom Gregory, entitled, "Body Counts Disguise The True Horror of What Wars Do to Bodies": "Relying on these statistics alone may provide us with a brief glimpse at the suffering of those affected, but it ends up concealing the violence it is supposed to expose. When dealing only with numbers, we tend to lose sight of the bodies that are left broken by the machinery of war, along with the individuals who are busy living and dying on the battlefield." This is an...
Carl Sagan and Reflections on the Significance of IR
I was remiss yesterday in failing to note that November 9, 2014 would have been Carl Sagan's 80th birthday. For a former astrophysicist such as myself, it is an opportunity for reflection on the significance of what we do in the study and practice of international relations. Sagan was a masterful communicator of important scientific ideas to the public. One of the lessons of cosmology he was so effective, and persistent, in communicating was the tenuousness of humanity's existence. Earth orbits a nondescript star in the relative hinter regions of a nondescript galaxy, one of more than...
Fall of the Berlin Wall: Then and Now
Today 25 years ago the Berlin Wall was torn down, one of the most consequential events of the 20th Century, catalyst for the end of the Cold War and freedom for millions stuck behind the Iron Curtain yanked down on them by the USSR. I was a student just starting to get interested in the wider world. I grew jealous of a couple of friends who were able to be there…in Berlin…dancing on the wall with the Germans…a seminal moment, which I watched on TV like everyone else. I got there as soon as I could, once finals were over. With a guy from my hostel who had a hammer, we warily approached a...
Christianity and the Sino-American Relationship
Last week, the Economist reported on the expanding sway of Christianity in China. While the numbers are difficult to pin down, The Economist reports that some argue that the number of Christians in China exceeds the number of official members of the Chinese Communist Party (87 million). What we are witnessing in China then is a dramatic shift in the constitution of domestic social systems in China as religion in general and Christianity in particular increasingly inform conceptions of what it means to be ‘Chinese’ and the accompanying systems of meaning. From the vantage point of many...