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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Explaining the Obvious in the Age of Trump
The President-Elect has called for expanding the US nuclear arsenal, not just modernizing it (old warheads may not be good warheads). And when asked about whether this might lead to an arms race,...
Public scholarship and the challenge of academics’ public engagement in a new global order
I'll confess that post-November 8th, 2016, I spent a large amount of time in despair and unable to write anything coherent on the topics I am most interested in contributing here at the Duck of...
Before you leave for the holiday season: Nominate your friends for The Duckies!
Grades are in, reviews submitted, and I'm headed out for the holiday season. I hope you are wrapping up the semester and/or enjoying a well-deserved break. Please remember to submit your...
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Monday Linkage
Hello Ducks... here are your Monday links... Theory Talks #63 interviews Siddharth Mallavarapu on "International Asymmetries, Ethnocentrism, and a View on IR from India." Oliver Stuenkel asks whether Intra-BRICS cooperation can advance amid economic gloom? Shanthie Mariet D'Souza gives India four scenarios for Afghanistan in the run up to the 2014 elections. Corey Robin asks whether Bob Dahl really did define politics as “The process that determines the authoritative allocation of values.” (Answer: No.) Election campaign posters in Indonesia incorporate Kung-Fu Panda for some reason......
Nuland: Comic misunderstanding?
Have Duck readers been following the latest glitch in U.S.-European relations? Josh mentioned it in his recent roundup. Here's how the Washington Post explained the story: On Thursday, a video was posted on YouTube in which Victoria Nuland,, the top U.S. diplomat for Europe, disparagingly dismissed European Union efforts to mediate the ongoing crisis in the Ukraine by bluntly saying, “F--- the E.U." On Friday, [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel, through press attache Christiane Wirtz, described the gaffe as “absolutely unacceptable,” and defended the efforts of Catherine Ashton, the E.U.’s...
Classroom Activity: Interpreting Regression Results
Editor's note: this post originally appeared on my personal blog. As I mentioned in a previous post, I've decided to try "flipping the classroom" this semester, meaning I'm posting the lectures online and using class time mostly for activities that reinforce core concepts and create incentives for students to keep up with the lectures from week to week. Look below the fold for a description of the second activity, which concerns the interpretation of regression results. First, I described the data I analyzed, which the students themselves provided to me last week (anonymously). Height is...
Friday Nerd Blogging
Fans must content themselves with some trivia this week. Here are "15 Things [Most People] Don't Know About Game of Thrones."
Thursday Linkage: Sochi Winter Olympics Edition
This Duck spent the day in the car en route to the Brazilian consulate in Houston to get visas for a summer field course so I'm running behind in my linkage for the week. In the car, I had the amazing experience of listening to an audioversion of The Idealist, Nina Munk's magisterial account of Jeff Sachs and the Millennium Villages Project. I'm moderating a conversation with Ms. Munk on Monday. For those of you who follow debates in international development, I found her take on Sachs to be quite measured, far more nuanced than the media accounts I had read. At times, I found myself...
OAIS Blogging Awards: Last Call to Vote
Voting closes tomorrow at 5pm EST for this year's OAIS Blogging Awards. If you haven't already done so, now is the time to cast your ballot. You can review the nominees and get more information here. Once the votes are in, we'll identify the finalists for each category and turn the process over to our panel of judges. We'll announce the winners at the OAIS Blogging Awards and Reception at ISA Annual Convention on Thursday, March 27.
Book Review: “Making Human Rights a Reality”
My students and I have just read Emilie Hafner-Burton's grand treatise on the human rights regime, Making Human Rights a Reality. Following her earlier empirical studies, this is a sweeping descriptive appraisal of how human rights law works and why it works so poorly, coupled with a level-headed argument about strategies that human rights champions or "stewards" might adopt to achieve concrete improvements in human rights performance by circumventing existing human rights machinery. The book is readable, exhaustive and pitched to a non-scholarly audience; it combines an overview of...
Tenure Letters: To Sling or to Shoot Arrows?
This piece has been making waves in the academic world (for a much better set of recommendations, see this piece). It gets much attention because it both identifies a real problem and then suggests awful ways to handle it. The latter is easier to deal with quickly. However, first let me be clear--what I am talking about here are the letters that universities ask outside scholars to write as they evaluate candidates for tenure and/or promotion. The basic idea is that these letters serve two purposes (at least): so that folks who do specialized work can be fairly evaluated if their work is...