Dov Levin answers 6 (+1) questions about 2020 book on foreign electoral interference. When do great powers back a specific party or candidate in another country? Can they change the electoral outcome? Find out.
While national security lawyers argue over whether Steve Bannon's appointment to the National Security Council is legal or not, members of Congress are pushing back to close whatever statutory...
When President Trump and Press Secretary Spicer started to insist that the protest against Muslim ban [that is not a ban] was paid for, it rang a bell. This kind of rhetoric is a textbook reaction...
A guest post by Layna Mosley,* Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (*with contributions from Jeff Colgan, Beth Copelovitch, Mark Copelovitch, Artie G,...
I am not known for being a statistics whiz. I have published quantitative work, but I am seen, rightly so, as more comfortable with qualitative work, comparing apples and oranges. Still, I had the gumption to offer advice on twitter about data today. What and why? GDELT was a new dataset that seemed to promise heaps of utility to those who wanted to study event data--which are counts of particular events of interest and handy for analyzing events over time. It came under fire recently for a variety of reasons. I did not use the dataset nor do I work with event data, so I am not in any...
Patty didn't want flowers, so instead endow a scholarship at Ohio University. This is from an email her husband sent out to her supporters: Please visit Ohio.edu/ Give and note in the online form that the gift is in memory of Dr. Patricia Weitsman and request that funds be designated to The Patricia A. Weitsman Memorial Scholarship, or call (740) 593-0732 to make a gift via phone She was such a great person, a terrific teacher and influential scholar. I am glad that that her school will have something lasting to mark her memory and her contributions.
Dear friends of Patty, The news is awful. The second battle with leukemia is over, but this time, Patty lost. The last effort to treat the disease failed, as she died last night. I thought her friends in the IR business should know. I found out about her struggle late during the first round of her fight, but was kept apprised via a community info-sharing/coordination group the second time. It is clear that Patty was just as brave, stubborn, tough, and all that the second time, but it was apparently not enough. Over the past year or two, I have been sending Patty silly pictures to try to...
Long ago, Dan Drezner posted about the imposter syndrome. The basic idea is that many folks feel as if they will be found out, that there are other folks out there that are smarter, more informed and that one is just getting away with being less than that until eventually getting found out. That piece resonated with me way back then, and it was funny to hear multiple people raise it this week in Toronto at the ISA. I suddenly realized why this might be the case: there are so many impressive people doing impressive stuff that everyone seems better, more expert and so on, so more folks feel...
It was a great night for Political Violence @ a Glance winning awards in two of the four of categories at this year's OAIS Blogging Awards held at ISA last night. They were the winners of the 2014 Award for Best Blog (Group) -- narrowly defeating The Monkey Cage. Christian Davenport won Best Blog Post of the Year for his post "Researching While Black, Why Conflict Research Needs More African Americans (Maybe)" at Political Violence @ a Glance last April. Barb Walter's "The Four Things We Know About How Civil Wars End (and what this tells us about Syria)" also at Political Violence @ a Glance...
One of the consequences of the ISA 2014 conference here in Toronto is that my extended blogging hiatus is coming to an end. Thanks to some experimental research in India, I haven't had a lot of time to share my thoughts in the past few months. In fact, I haven't had too many thoughts during this period either. However, now I have one. On Wednesday, I was honored to participate in a roundtable on climate policy organized by Detlef Sprinz from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. My participation notwithstanding, the roundtable featured a great group of scholars: Detlef, Robert...
Greetings from Toronto. In advance of tonight's OAIS blogging awards gathering at 7:15pm in Sheraton Ballroom C, the Duck non-collective collective got together for a pre-soiree soiree. Â Folks were in good from. For many of us, it was the first chance for us to ever meet in person. For me, this is a quick trip, as I'm headed back this am after a busy day of panels, the business meeting of the new ISA section on global health, and a lovely dinner sponsored by Bridging the Gap. With a toddler at home and a busy spring of travel, this Duck is needed to tag team on the toddler front before my...
As the gods of the International Studies Association have seen fit to place my panel at 8:15 on a Saturday morning, I decided to advertise my talk in the blogosphere in hopes of drumming up some attendees. Below please see the teaser trailer for my working paper this year, which explores the impact of science fiction on global policy making in the area of autonomous weapons. The paper itself is not yet ready for distribution (research is still in progress), but I should be able to circulate later this year and feedback at the panel will help me refine my conceptual framework - so if you are...