PTJ and Dan discuss Cynthia Weber’s 1994 book, Simulating Sovereignty: Intervention, the State an…
Episode 28: Are We Living in a Simulation… of Sovereignty?
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Recent Posts
Professor Julie Kaarbo on the Duck of Minerva
Professor Julie Kaarbo (U. of Edinburgh) discusses role theory, the relationship between FPA and IR theory, and a new project she is calling Breaking Bad. As always thanks go to Steve Dancz (https://stevedancz.com) for our theme music.
Episode 4: Julie Kaarbo
Professor Julie Kaarbo discusses Foreign Policy Analysis.
Visualizing the Gender Publication Gap: 1999-2019
This is a guest post from Laura Breen, a PhD student with research interests in international law, global governance, and emerging technology; Gaea Morales, a PhD student with research interests in...
More Recent Posts
Quacking is Dangerous to Your Health?
I might have to re-think this whole life choice. Tenure is supposed to mean more than just job security--that it is about academic freedom. To teach and research in ways that may not always be popular and certainly in ways that are not politically desirable. Yet in the past couple of weeks, we...
In Defense of Teaching (and Grading) the Long Research Paper
There's a Slate article titled "The End of the College Essay" circulating in various Facebook and Twitter circles critical of assigning long essays to undergraduates. The gist of the complaint mirrors the complaints I've heard over the years from students and colleagues (and others outside the...
Tuesday Afternoon Linkage: A Dish Best Served Cold
I hope cold links are good as the temperature up in Ottawa is now just at 0F (known as the temperature where dogs whine and snot freezes in one's nose). Anyhow, here are my last links of 2013: Lots of stuff out there on the Chinese Air Defense ID Zone, so here is one that clarifies what it is and...
Blogging Awards Nomination Update
The nominations are trickling in, but there's more work to be done. We had some major IR blogging events this year -- Snowden, Egypt, Syria, Russia, etc.... and we're looking for nominations for the best work out there in 2013. We're still taking nominations through the end of the month. Sage...
Having it All? A Male Academic’s Perspective
With Thanksgiving behind us and the winter holidays and family time approaching, the season encourages some stock-taking and reflection. We at the Duck have been having a bit of behind the scenes emailing about the challenges of finding child care, and I wanted to recount a happier story from my...
Friday Nerd Blogging: The Tasty Sequel
Much baking to be had this time of year, so it only makes sense that we play the Hungry Games again:
Human Rights Week Roundup: New Work by (Somewhat) New Scholars
December 10th was UN Human Rights Day, starting off Human Rights Week. In many regards, 2013 has been a very good year for human rights practices around the world. In other regards, 2013 has had some abysmal failures when it comes to human rights on the ground, especially the rights of sexual...
The Importance of Angry Letters
Editor’s Note: this is an abbreviated version of a post that originally appeared on my personal blog. How can international institutions foster cooperation given that they lack enforcement capability? One view, quite simply, is that they can't. This view is shared by realists and many outside the...
The Good Old Days
When people lament about how broken academia is now (for example Higgs of Higgs-Boson), I am so tempted to generalize about the olden days: Many, if not most, jobs were not advertised publicly and many job processes were really old boys networks at work. The job market may not be efficient and...
Will There Be Other Transformational Figures Like Mandela?
Mandela's memorial service was yesterday, and the speeches and coverage were laudatory, as they should be, and the crowd was raucous, celebratory, despite the rain. Obama in his speech challenged the audience to use Mandela's example in their own lives, to "take risks on behalf of ideals" but in a...
Cyber Shrinkage: Loss and Cyber Security
The nature of cyber discourse concerns me, and this is a point I have written about extensively with Ryan Maness (Valeriano and Maness 2012a, Valeriano and Maness 2012b, Valeriano and Maness 2014). The idea is that threats we see materialize from cyberspace seem to vastly outweigh any other...
Will China meet its energy-related targets under its 12th five year plan?
Did you see the photos like the one above out of Shanghai? For the first time ever, Shanghai's air pollution, like Beijing's before it, exceeded the scale for particulate matter. For the past seven days, the air quality has been so bad that schools and flights were cancelled, cars were forced off...