Robert Cox’s landmark article, “Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Rela…
Episode 32: Social Forces, States, and Clydeside Whisky
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Recent Posts
Episode 14: Campbell Writes Security, part 2
It’s not quite Song of Ice and Fire territory, but we’re sure a few people will be pleased that t…
Voldemort, Trump, and the other usual suspects of Putin’s press conference
Klimentyev, RIA Novosti. Sing it with me: It’s the most Putinist time of the year! For the 16th time the Dear Leader addressed the nation and the world from through their TV screens during a...
Writing about Violence During the Pandemic
This is guest post from Philipp Schulz, a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Institute for Intercultural and International Studies (InIIS) at the University of Bremen. His work focuses on the...
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Friday Nerd Blogging: Gun Control, Dragon Control, and Star(Buck) Power
I realize I am putting my Twitter standings at great risk by potentially appearing to make light of an important social issue.* But when I found this treatise on the importance of tighter regulations for dragons I couldn't resist sharing. Happy Friday! Game of Thrones - Dragon Control by...
Equity in Global Climate Governance: An Update From Warsaw
Following on my round of links on Thursday, this is a guest post from Jennifer Hadden from the University of Maryland who is in Warsaw at the global climate negotiations (follow her on Twitter here). Yeb Saño, Climate Change Commissioner of the Philippines, opened the annual negotiations of the UN...
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...