The Bidens are serving the Macrons US-made wine and cheese. A cute gesture or a clumsy diplomatic move?
Say “cheese”!
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Recent Posts
The networks and hidden procedures that keep discrimination alive in academia
This is the third post in our series on Race&IR.This is a guest post from Carla Norrlöf and Cheng Xu. Carla Norrlöf is an associate professor at the University of Toronto. Her research is in...
Racism in Social Science: Copy, Paste, Repeat (An Urgent Call to Action)
This is the second installment in our series on Race&IR.This is a guest post from Ebby L. Abramson who is a Doctoral student in the political science program at the University of Ottawa and a...
The Virus in the Digital Domain: How Governments Can Respond To Coronavirus-Themed Cyberattacks
Courtesy of US Navy, used under Creative Commons license. This is a guest post by William Akoto, a postdoctoral researcher jointly appointed at the Sié Chéou-Kang Center for International...
More Recent Posts
Thursday Morning Linkage – Special Climate Negotiations Edition
The annual climate negotiations are going on at the moment in Warsaw, Poland. For long-time observers of the process, they have a Groundhog Day-esque quality to them. Every year the same issues seem to come up again and again, and it's unclear if there has been any meaningful progress or if each...
Tactical Concessions or a Kiss Off? Understanding Recent Changes in Chinese Human Rights Policies
As has been widely reported in the Western media, on Friday, China’s state media finally officially announced two changes in human rights policies: (a) an end of the “Laojiao” policy of “re-education through labor” and (b) a change in the one-child policy in China, allowing two children per family...
Announcing the 2014 Blogging Awards and Reception at ISA
Duck of Minerva is pleased to announce the second annual Online Achievement in International Studies (OAIS) Blogging Awards -- better known as the Duckie Awards -- and the second annual International Studies Blogging Reception at ISA in Toronto. We are asking Duck readers to submit nominations for...
Hard to Say I’m Sorry
The reports about the bilateral agreement between the US and Afghanistan that would allow American troops (and other western countries essentially) have suggested that President Hamid Karzai would support the agreement if President Obama apologized or admitted mistakes in the conduct of the war....
Tuesday Evening Linkage: Shorter and Later Than Ever!
My new job as semi-weekly Tuesday linker is off to an uneven start. I am behind on link collection as I was roaming this past weekend in the cell phone sense--in the US where my cell phone is super-expensive and wifi was not so available. Anyhow, here are some links that may be of interest to the...
Campaigners Set International Agenda on Autonomous Weapons
The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots secured an important victory last week when delegates of States Parties to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) voted unanimously to take up the issue as part of their work to oversee the implementation and further development of the 1980 treaty,...
Mixing Scholarly with Blogging Identities
[Note: This is a guest post from Mira Sucharov and Brent E. Sasley. Mira Sucharov is Associate Professor of Political Science at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She blogs at Haaretz.com and at Open Zion. Follow her on Twitter. Brent Sasley is Associate Professor in the Department of...
My Japanese Hate-Mail Tells I am a ‘S— Kimchi Propagandist’ (Hah!) …Where’s Thunderdome When You Need it?
Hollywood’s solution to intractable interstate conflicts This is what happens when you write in the area of Japanese-Korean relations. Pretty much everybody hates you, because you don’t tell them what they want to hear, and then maximalists come out of the woodwork to, as Robert Farley aptly put...
Why Write About Gender if You are Going to Get Blasted for it: diplomacy lessons from Miss Universe?
This week Dan Drezner hosted a guest post on the politics of Miss Universe and I responded by pointing out the lack of/and the need for a gender analysis in his post. In his response, Drezner asks an important question: "Why on God's green earth would I want to venture out from my professional...
Avoiding the Joint Security Trap (and Countering Conventional Wisdom)
The diplomatic dustup over Syria brought Russia in from the cold but simultaneously froze any notion that western allies were getting their strategic act together. Nonetheless, although the mistakes in the U.S. and UK’s approach to building support at home and abroad for an intervention in Syria...
Miss Universe is Like Other International Organizations…except the members are half naked
Last week Dan Drezner asked What Does Miss Universe Tell us About World Politics in 2013? The post starts off on a positive note- that one can find politics anywhere- before it descends into one of the most classic examples of gender-avoidance/oblivion I've read in ages. Drezner swiftly calls on...
Friday Nerd Blogging: Lost in Furniture
Given the low salaries many of us start out at, we probably overly identify with the crisis contained within this trailer (no significant spoilers):