Patrick and Dan talk about the newest feature of the podcast: a series in which they combine thei…
Episode 29: Introducing: Whiskey & IR Theory… in Space!
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Recent Posts
How do you kill a zombie argument? Middle East studies edition
I've started practicing mindfulness, partly to deal with the stress of being a Professor and parent of small kids in a pandemic, and partly to reduce the number of times I become unreasonably angry...
Introducing Bridging the Gap’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Fellow: Emmanuel Balogun
The Bridging the Gap team is thrilled to announce the addition of a new member of our leadership team: Emmanuel Balogun, the inaugural BtG Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Fellow. We recently sat...
Not everything outside the Pentagon is “soft power”
As someone who works on religion and politics, I encounter the term "soft power" a lot. Most of the time it's in a good way; soft power is a means to advocate for policies that draw on our values...
More Recent Posts
Obama's "Lack" of Strategy Towards ISIS
The last two days have seen a maelstrom of media attention to President Obama’s admission that he currently does not have a strategy for attacking or containing ISIS (The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) in Syria. It is no surprise that those on the right criticized Obama’s candid remarks, and...
APSA Fire Update
Well, the main APSA hotel at the Marriott last night caught fire last night in what might be an act of arson, but we really don't know. For those of us staying at the Marriott, we awoke at 1am to alarms and recorded messages to evacuate the building. We stayed outside until around 4:30 or 5am when...
In Exile at Home: Impressions from Europe
I have been able to avoid this fate for almost 12 years now, but they finally got me. Being a citizen of Germany, I have been studying in the U.S. on student visas for the last decade and even though it has always been a bureaucratic nightmare, associated with significant financial costs, I...
Why I'm Not At APSA This Labor Day
Every year at this time I receive several queries a day from colleagues, would-be colleagues and students asking me if I'll be "at APSA" - the Annual Conference of the American Political Science Association - and when we could meet up for a coffee. Every year I reply several times a day: "Sadly, I...
Thursday APSA Linkage
Many of your Ducks are descending upon DC for the annual APSA conference which is appropriately timed at the beginning of the academic year and the school year. I know I have been looking forward to starting the semester completely shattered from slogging through revisions on papers. It's all the...
NATO: Silly Proposals and Enduring Realities
I was going to post about my talk in Toronto on NATO , but now I have a slightly different NATO post to write: a response to this piece by Anne Applebaum proposing that Obama magically fix NATO. Given that the title of my talk was “The Present and Future of NATO: More of the Same,” it is...
Meaningful Punishment
Seeing reports in the New York Times today on further Russian aggression in Ukraine has me thinking about Ely Ratner and Elizabeth Rosenberg’s recent article entitled “Pointless Punishment?" where they argue that Western sanctions on Russia are at best pointless and at worst counterproductive. I...
Thursday Linkage
I saw this image on Twitter tonight and it kind of summarized how I feel about the news this summer which has been awful. I've been reading posts from thoughtful commentators like Steve Walt, Micah Zenko, and Jay Ulfelder who remind us that it's not all bad or at least it's not as bad as has been...
Ferguson and American Foreign Policy
I see a connection between what is happening in Ferguson, the now roiling suburb of St. Louis, and American security policy. An odd connection to make at first glance, but stay with me. In the context of the important questions of institutionalized violence and race relations, it can be easy to...
Thursday Linkage
Potpourri this week with Micah Zenko on the tendency for mission creep in humanitarian interventions and other U.S. military missions, Marc Lynch pushing back on whether arming the Syria rebels would have worked, story on ISIS’ capture of the Mosul Dam and an interesting twist on water and security challenges, bad air in China (I’m shocked) and the challenges the country is finding tapping its shale gas reserves, and, finally, why the lead Sierra Leone doctor fighting Ebola didn’t get the experiment treatment.
Thinking About Governments and Violence
I got into an extended twitter discussion about the 1992 LA riots. Why? Because that event helped to inform much of my thinking about ethnic conflict and because I see in Ferguson some key similarities despite the on-going events being about police aout of control rather than riots. How so? The...
Monstermind or the Doomsday Machine? Autonomous Cyberwarfare
Today in Wired magazine, James Bamford published a seven-page story and interview with Edward Snowden. The interview is another unique look into the life and motivations of one of America’s most (in)famous whistleblowers; it is also another step in revealing the depth and technological capacity of...