The blogosphere peaked somewhere in the mid-2000s, so why would anyone start blogging in 2023?
Why Blog Now? An Introduction
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Recent Posts
Will Eastern Mediterranean tensions matter to IR if there is no war?
We open each of my undergrad classes with a discussion of current events. In the past four years, there have been several times that students have wondered whether a war may be about to break out:...
Meet Our Guest Ducks (Again)
With the coronavirus, it has been hard for many of us to just keep going, let alone set aside time to blog (certainly not as much as we otherwise might!). So, we wanted to acknowledge that by giving...
Race and the Russian IR
This is the fifth post in the our series Race&IR. Black Lives Matter has spearheaded a massive reckoning of race relations in the US and around the world, but not so much in Russia. The...
More Recent Posts
Monday Evening Linkage: have yourself a gender-neutral Christmas?
Have yourself a gender-neutral Christmas, let your toys be yellow. From now on our princess costumes and toy guns will be out of sight.... Well, you try to rhyme with this material. The Daily Mail asked yesterday "how to shop for gender neutral toys" noting the sea of blue and pink dividing stores...
2014 OAIS Blogging Awards: Call for Nominations
We're a few weeks into the call for nominations for the 2014 OAIS Awards. It's time to get serious. We've had a number of impressive nominations, but given the excellent content out there, we're looking for a much larger pool of nominees. We want to hear your suggestions. Post your nominations...
Friday Nerd Blogging: Solving 21st Century Defense Procurement Challenges
The effort to develop a single 5th generation fighter plane has been a challenge for the US and its allies. The F-35 is very expensive and may underperform. The quality of debate about this plane has varied. So, we turn to the experts for a reasoned discussion of the F-35 and an alternative:...
Cyber Arms Proliferation and Arms Races
With the assumption of an ongoing global cyber arms race, Western governments signed an agreement to limit the sharing and selling of dangerous cyber technologies. David Livingstone notes, “[Cyber security technology] is a lot like the arms race. What you want to do is slow down how fast your...
Remembering Mandela and the Movement Against Apartheid
In 1987, I was a high school sophomore and somehow, no doubt through rock music, became aware of the anti-apartheid struggle. As it was for President Obama, the movement to end apartheid was my political baptism. It's what got me engaged and interested in global politics. I remember going to the...
Data Dilemmas & Converging Logics
One of the recurring subjects among folks using data is: why does person x not share their data with me? Mostly because they are fearful and ignorant. Fearful? That their work will get scooped and/or their data might be found to be problematic. Ignorant? That they don't know that they are...
Thursday Morning Linkage – Grumpy End of Semester Edition
This week's stories have no unifying theme other than they kind of capture the end of term mood, a certain grumpiness on the part of the writer (Bjorn Lomborg's tsk tsking of clean energy advocates, Paul Collier's screed against immigration) or not altogether pleasant images (an elephant run amok...
2014 Grawemeyer Award Winner
Congratulations to Jacques E.C. Hymans for winning the 2014 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. The award is administered by the University of Louisville's Department of Political Science. Disclosure: I'm currently the Department chair and for 17 years I directed the award...
Tuesday Post-Dusk Linkage
I tried to get this out at dusk, but Steve Martin and I both have a problem with doing things at dusk. This week's Tuesday links follow thusly: First, Duck-ster Phil Arena demonstrated the power of twitter as his rant on twitter about the events in Ukraine got picked up by Max Fisher of the...
Monday Evening Linkage: moustaches and Michelle Obama
Well it is officially December- and you know what that means...all the hipsters and single dudes can finally shave off their Movember moustaches (those are the only men who participate, right?). Movember is a fundraiser for testicular cancer that has gained traction (in 2012 the campaign raised 29...
World AIDS Day and the Global Fund Replenishment
Sunday, December 1st was World AIDS Day, the annual reminder of the state of the epidemic, a way to focus attention on a problem that is perhaps less visible than it was two or three years but not defeated, not by a long shot. To that end, this week, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria...
4 Quick Hypotheses on Why China Suddenly Declared this New Air Defense Zone
If you haven’t yet seen the zone’s geography, here it is to the left, complete with its overlap with the Korean and Japanese zones. The most important conflict of course is over Senkaku, but Korea watchers will also note that the Ieodo submerged reef, which Korea claims, is also in the zone. Gotta...