It’s our first “actual” installment of Whiskey & IR Theory in Space! We discuss Star Trek: Th…
Episode 30: A Long, Strange Trek
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Recent Posts
Episode 13 – Luke Ashworth
Professor Lucian Ashworth talks about growing up in England and Wales, his decision to go to Keele, and his major influences.
Indonesia’s Half-hearted Response to COVID-19: The Role of Politics and Historical Legacies
This is a guest post from Alexander R Arifianto (Twitter: @DrAlexArifianto), a Research Fellow with S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore....
The Interviews for Teaching World Politics Project
In less than a month, I'll be teaching "Introduction to International Relations" for the first time in over ten years. As luck (for certain values of "luck") would have it, this means I'm building a...
More Recent Posts
NGOs: Chemical Weapons are the Least of Syrian Civilians’ Concerns
Action on Armed Violence is circulating some terrific info-graphs and advocacy videos documenting civilian harms from various conventional weapons in Syria: By even the most cautious estimates, explosive weapons have killed and injured tens of thousands of people in Syria. They are thought to be...
The Problem with Grand Strategy: Preemptive Cyber War with China
Grand Strategy is an arcane and misapplied concept. Developing a Grand Strategy to deal with China that focuses on cyber capabilities is a dangerous move that will have large repercussions for the international system. The National Interest recently hosted a debate about the merits of the Air...
Monday morning links
The international news continues to be dominated by Saturday's terrorist attack at Westgate Mall in Nairobi, Kenya. The coverage of the attacks in most major newspapers has been excellent (and peppered with first-person reflections) due to the large number of reporters and photojournalists who are...
Women and the residential fellowship: a few thoughts
In my email inbox last week was a notification of a fellowship opportunity. Since I have a sabbatical coming up shortly—okay, in a couple of years, but time flies, right?—I eagerly skimmed the details. It’s a fellowship squarely in my field. The funding is pretty generous, probably enough to...
Friday Nerd Blogging: The End Is Nigh, Say It Ain’t So
Breaking Bad is down to two episodes left. Just like a great book, you want to desperately get to the end until you realize that the end means the end of a great story-telling experience. So, here is one set of folks pondering the end with heaps of spoilers.
And on that note…
It seems altogether appropriate to me that my last Duck post should be a post about pedagogy. The more years I spend in this business, the more convinced I am that our area of greatest impact, and the place where our academic vocations are most clearly on display, is the classroom. Whether...
Friday Morning Linkage
The Assad regime says the Syrian conflict is at a stalemate. Meanwhile a cease-fire between Free Syrian Army and Islamic State in Iraq and Syria forces in Azaz. Roy Gutman from McClatchy reports on some of the dynamics between FSA and radical Islamists. Battling it out in public --...
What if Iran Did Get the Bomb?
Casual observation suggests that the two most common answers to the question above are: 1) there's a very good chance that they'd start a nuclear war with Israel; and 2) there's no real reason to think any other state would be impacted in any significant way. I find both unpersuasive for reasons...
Podcasting Killed the Lecturing Star
The first video ever played on MTV, back when MTV played music videos most of the time, was the one-hit wonder "Video Killed the Radio Star" by The Buggles. A lament about how new technology ended the career of a singer who was well-adapted to the production standards and genre constraints of an...
What Is Policy Relevance, and (How) Should We Reward International Relations Scholars for It?
The subfield of international relations seems to suffer from an inferiority complex. While most subfields of political science do their research and trust that the results are relevant to policy for a good reason, many an international relations scholar complains that the subfield is not relevant...
Thursday Morning Linkage
After last week's diplomatic overtures on Syria, we've entered a period of relative calm and back to our mixed bag of stories of interest. NPR is running a fabulous series on Brazil in the lead up to the World Cup, which is also timely since the Brazilian president cancelled her plans to visit the...
Analytic Eclecticism, Phantom Confrontations, and Dialogue: On Reus-Smit´s “Beyond Metatheory?”
[Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Guzman Castro of the University of Pennsylvania. This post refers to an article and post in the European Journal of International Relations-Duck of Minerva symposium on "The End of International Relations Theory?"by Christian Reus-Smit and the corresponding...