Matt Hancock, a Conservative MP and the UK’s Health Secretary during most of the Covid lockdowns, has failed upwards.
Failing Upwards and Global Elitism
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The Politics of Reform in the Middle East: A Conversation with Erin Snider
Each Spring, Bridging the Gap (BTG) announces the recipients of our annual Policy Engagement Fellowships (PEF), the purpose of which is to support efforts by scholars to connect their research on...
What Shapes Public Attitudes Toward Hosting Syrian Refugees – And How They Can Change
Guest post by Tiffany S. Chu, Alex Braithwaite, Faten Ghosn, and Justin Curtis Plans to fund a border wall at the U.S.-Mexico border are troubling D.C. politics. During his campaign for the...
What’s a War Crime Gotta Do To Get Some Attention?
This is a guest post by Betcy Jose and Alessa Sänger. Jose is currently a Fellow in the Cluster of Excellence: Formation of Normative Orders at Goethe University. Sänger is pursuing a Master Degree...
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Tweets of the Week #3
It's the weekend, so it's time for the third edition of “Tweets of the Week.” My twitter feed was again filled with some interesting micro-blogging. By the way, I apologize for the way last week's home page post looked. Obviously, I'm doing something wrong with the images, though it seems to be fine once the reader clicks the link to Continue Reading. I hope readers can see the image at the top of this page. This week, the bombing campaign against ISIS/ISIL was ramped up thanks to new air strikes in Syria. I believe that most people in my feed are unenthusiastic about the entire enterprise...
Ready for the Weekend Quasi-Linkage: Are Political Scientists Useless?
Steve and I had a good Twitter exchange with Tom Ricks about whether or not political science is useless to policymakers, particularly quantitative work and modeling. I thought this exchange was funny because today I saw that Colin Kahl, friend and more importantly, a damn good political scientist, was just appointed as Vice President Biden's National Security Advisor. Ricks' broadside has provoked a few choice blog posts from Steve, Paul Staniland, Tom Pepinsky, and Henry Farrell. (Dan Drezner also had a good one on the topic from 2012). I also thought Ezra Klein's column from a week or so...
Neoliberalizing the academy
Josh’s post on his experience with course evaluations has gotten me thinking about the practice of using course evaluations. Because my personal circumstances differ from Josh’s (e.g. I do not have children), I have been able to avoid some of the painful tradeoffs he discusses and have not yet had to confront ‘bad’ evaluations. Reading his post, however, prompted me to connect some dots that have been floating around in my head regarding the ideological underpinnings of practices in the academy with recent pieces I have seen in the media—specifically a NYTimes report on the release of the...
ISIS, Syria, the Rebels and the US-Led Coalition: What Governs Who?
In a phone call today with a friend working on issues pertaining to the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), an interesting question arose. In particular, what types of conflict are going on with the fight against ISIS? My friend wanted to draw attention to the R2P aspects of the crisis, and whether the “intervention” on the side of the US was just according to these standards. While this is certainly an interesting question, I think it points us in the direction of a larger set of questions regarding the nature of the conflict itself. That is, what are the existing laws with which we ought to...
Bad Evals: Further Thoughts on Having it All
So, I got some bad teaching evaluations from last semester (bad by my standards at least. Hell, by anybody's standards). It's kind of thrown me for a loop because I pride myself on being a good scholar, a good teacher, and a good husband/father. But, sometimes it may not be possible to pull off all three of these things well simultaneously, especially if you've got an ambitious research agenda, equally challenging and risky courses, and a toddler at home. That wasn't my immediate reaction when I read the students comments, but I've kind of gravitated to that conclusion, if only to stave off...
What’s Next for the Global Climate Movement?
This is a guest post from Jennifer Hadden, who is an assistant professor at the University of Maryland. She guest blogged on the Duck before on global climate negotiations. She also has a forthcoming book from Cambridge on climate advocacy called Networks in Contention: The Divisive Politics of Climate Change. The largest climate change demonstration in history took place on Sunday. According to organizers of the People’s Climate March, an estimated 400,000 people participated in the protest in New York. For comparison, the size of the march was comparable to the scale of the February 15...
The Short-Termist Cost of Security
It is no secret in the academic IR community that securitization theory, an approach developed in Europe as part of the Copenhagen School of security studies, has struggled to get traction here in the United States. While the approach is widely used elsewhere in the world, from Europe to Asia, American IR scholars have been very reticent reluctant to accept the merits of the approach. Which is a shame because the approach has the potential to offer significant insights. One possible objection to securitization theory might be that, since it argues threats are political and intersubjective...
Tweets of the Week #2
Welcome to the second edition of "Tweets of the Week." It was a busy seven days for news and my twitter feed provided much useful information -- in micro-form. The Scottish independence referendum featured especially prominently in my feed. This was perhaps my favorite tweet about the final result: Prior to the vote, my feed was filled with some great tweets about the #indyref. Here are a few of the shorter ones that I found especially helpful: https://twitter.com/johnpmcdermott/status/512346430908805120 https://twitter.com/ZiggyRoswell/status/510153980144787457 The Scottish referendum, of...