Alongside research and teaching, most tenure-track jobs come with some expectation of service.
Strategic Service on the Tenure Track
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Recent Posts
Getting Counterinsurgency Wrong
I just published a piece in Foreign Affairs, which draws on my new book, Bullets Not Ballots: Success in Counterinsurgency Warfare. After two decades, the United States is finally leaving...
Centering George W. Bush in the Etiology of the Iraq War
The second- and third-most downloaded articles at the journal Security Studies both tackle the causes of the Iraq War. This might reflect an imbalance of supply and demand: there aren't that many...
The Vision Thing: More on the New Duck
Is there still room for a traditional academic international-relations blog? An overview of relevant history and the Duck’s approach to blogging.
More Recent Posts
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...
Friday Nerd Blogging: Stata and Death
Fun post that sorts the patterns of life and death in Westeros and beyond. I am sure that some multivariate analysis is likely, but was not presented in the post.
The Politics of Artificial Intelligence and Automation
The Pew Research Internet Project released a report yesterday, “AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs” where it describes a bit of a contradictory vision: the future is bright and the future is bleak. The survey, issued to a nonrandomized group of “experts” in the technology industry and academia,...