American Dove makes pragmatic case for a dovish foreign policy. The use of force is a terrible foreign-policy instrument: it’s expensive and hardly ever works.
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Never Too Early for a Crisis in Civil-Military Relations
To be clear, the latest news is "intra-civilian" but is likely to cross over given the stakes. Remember the old days where the "smart" Bolsheviks left the personnel and other boring issues to...
ISA Conferences in Trump’s America
In conversations with friends, I quickly realized that the International Studies Association faces some significant problems ahead. The advent of the Trump administration is likely to lead to two...
A Plea for Cease Fire in the New American Civil War, Part II—The Case for Civility and a Changed Tone of Debate
Consider these two presidential statements: “Happy New Year to all, including to my many enemies and those who have fought me and lost so badly they just don’t know what to do....
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A Fan Letter to Nicholas Kristof.
Dear Mr. Kristof, Since you're getting so much hate mail from political scientists this week, I thought I'd send you a fan letter. I teach international relations at University of Massachusetts. I am an avid reader of your columns, especially on human rights advocacy. You have put issues like fistula on the global agenda. You put privileged young people in touch with global issues. You are a master at boiling down complex issues to accessible human interest stories. What I have admired most about your work is that you so rarely limit yourself to complaining. So many pundits write atrocity...
Monday Morning Links
Good morning. Here are your links ... Bilal Sarwary at the BBC gives us a glimpse of Helmand province that is rarely seen.  He writes, "This type of checkpost is the real front line. There are poppy fields on one side, police headquarters on the other and constant fights with the Taliban."  So much for Operation Khanjar having made any impact at all... Arshia Sattar at the WSJ defends Wendy Doniger against Penguin's capitulation to censorship demands in India. Ajai Shukla at Broadsword Blog tells us that China is articulating its own vision of the Indo-Pacific, "the Maritime Silk-Route."...
Denying Tenure and Moving On
For some people this has been a very good month, for others, no so much. Tenure (and by proxy promotion) is the thing most American Professors strive for, desire, believe is the crowning moment in their careers.* I will say for one, tenure denials, whether justified or outrageous – happen. Our careers are determined by many things but tenure is not one of them. It is a process filled with problems, but important nonetheless. For me, there was some liberation in having the process go poorly. Who I am kidding, I relished being denied. It freed me, allowed me to work on things I was too...
Academic Family Tree
Almost exactly three years ago, Patrick Thaddeus Jackson blogged "Who’s Your Grand-Advisor? Crowdsourcing an IR lineage map" at the Duck. Patrick was searching for an academic family tree website with a focus on international relations: I did a little digging and thus far have been completely unable to locate something that I would have thought that someone would have already assembled: an online searchable database that mapped adviser-advisee relationships in IR. So far as I know, there is no such thing. Not yet. I think that a map like this would be a very useful tool for all kinds of...
The Great Poli Sci Portfolio
In the dustup produced by Nick Kristof, one of the basic misperceptions keeps being repeated--that the American Political Science Review is not influential or readable enough. The job of the APSR is not to be read by policy-makers but by political scientists. Really? Yes. Let me explain. The academic journals have their place in the profession just as those aimed at outreach do. Why have academic journals? So that political scientists can do the science that is necessary for the generation of knowledge: developing arguments in reaction to and building on pre-existing work (that would be...
Some Personal Reflections on Social Media and Tenure
Editor's note: this post first appeared on my personal blog. As some of you may know, I'm up for tenure this year, and it's not going to work out. I don't want to get into the details of anything that ought not be discussed in public, but I thought I'd share some quick thoughts that some of you might find to be of interest. First, to the best of my understanding, my presence on social media played little to no role in this decision. So if there's still fear out there that blogging comes at a price, please don't point to my case as an example. I don't know exactly why this happened, and...
NYT and Poli Sci Public Engagement
The ISA mess is the gift that keeps on giving. Now Nicholas Kristof has written a piece in his NYT column that "addresses" the controversy. The problem is that the column is out of date. Not just in focusing on the ISA proposal that has been beaten back by the forces of reason (that would be me and other bloggers?), but that other canards get lumped in. While some noted bloggers have been denied tenure, it is highly unlikely that their blogging did them in. Indeed, there is more pressure by lots of folks (presidents, provosts, deans, grant agencies) to do more outreach. And there is...
The Pivot to Asia: Some Tough Questions
The so-called Pivot to Asia, or "rebalance" in official parlance, has been one of the Obama Administration's signature strategic moves on the global chessboard. But for all the serious engagement of the Pacific Rim countries, the core of the pivot has always been about China and responding to its rise as a regional and proto global power. U.S. intentions aside, China has accused the U.S. of using the pivot as a form of neo-containment of itself. The containment of the Soviet Union during the Cold War ultimately proved to be a stabilizing strategic move by the U.S. and its western allies....