A distinctly unoriginal take on the pathologies of overvaluing academic “novelty.”
Get off my lawn! Are journal demands for “novelty” creating a culture of low-level academic dishonesty?
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Recent Posts
“We are not okay. And you shouldn’t be either.”
Sadly, it took the extrajudicial killing of yet another unarmed black man at the hands of the police for me to find my voice about finishing a dissertation under quarantine during a pandemic. I have...
It isn’t just about Wæver and Buzan
In case you missed it, quite the IR controversy has broken out. In August 2019, Alison Howell and Melanie Richter-Montpetit (hereafter H&RM) published “Is securitization theory racist?...
Revisiting the Fear-Apathy Cycle in Global Health in Light of COVID-19
This is a guest post from Ashley Fox, an Assistant Professor of Public Administration and Policy at Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, University at Albany, SUNY. who researches the...
More Recent Posts
The Complexities of Intervening in Syria
Well into the Syrian civil war the Assad regime has made a costly miscalculation by staging a significant chemical weapons attack. The U.S. and its allies have been wary of a full-scale military operation in Syria, but spurred by this attack they are now preparing to intervene. To succeed western...
Hypotheses Tested
The Duck has a symposium which engages the European Journal of International Relation's special issue on "The End of IR Theory." One of the pieces is the final version of the draft that John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt circulated last winter. If y'all remember, I had a few words to say about...
Win Phil’s Money
My views on the role of assumptions are no secret. Nor are they without detractors. In hopes of advancing the debate, I invite anyone who disagrees with me to enrich themselves while proving me wrong. Pick any scholarly paper you have written, published or not. If I cannot identify three...
Symposium — In Defense of Simplistic Hypothesis Testing
Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Dan Reiter. It is the fourth installment in our "End of IR Theory" companion symposium for the special issue of the European Journal of International Relations. SAGE has temporarily ungated all of the articles in that issue. This post responds to John J....
Symposium — Leaving Theory Behind: Why Simplistic Hypothesis Testing is Bad for IR
Editor's Note: This is a guest post by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt. It is the third installment in our "End of IR Theory" companion symposium for the special issue of the European Journal of International Relations. SAGE has temporarily ungated all of the articles in that issue. This...
Clarifying Punitive Intervention
[Editor's Note: This is a guest post from Professor Anthony F. Lang, chair in International Political Theory and Director of the Centre for Global Constitutionalism at the University of St. Andrews.] Since I wrote my short defence of punitive air strikes against Syria last week in a post at...
Symposium — Defining Theory Down
Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Inanna Hamati-Ataya. It is the second installment in our "End of IR Theory" companion symposium for the special issue of the European Journal of International Relations. SAGE has temporarily ungated all of the articles in that issue. This post responds to...
Friday Morning Linkage
Syria: Richard Betts cuts to the core of Obama's challenge on Syria: "To the extent that any policy is strategically sensible, it is unlikely to be politically palatable; to the extent that a policy can be accepted as politically legitimate, it is unlikely to be of much strategic merit." I can't...
Symposium — The End of International Relations Theory?
Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Tim Dunne, Lene Hansen and Colin Wight. It is the first installment in our "End of IR Theory" companion symposium for the special issue of the European Journal of International Relations. SAGE has temporarily ungated all of the articles in that issue. This...
Friday Nerd Blogging: APSA Needs More Medleys
I am scheduling this for Friday, as I think that mid-APSA is the best time for some Star Wars medley mash. I could be wrong, of course.
Make Love and War? Sex and Syria …
Among the more famous anti-war slogans in the US is the 1960s' declaration of "make love, not war." I found myself thinking about that phrase when a student sent me a link to the Daily Show on Monday - where Jon Stewart made some insightful comments about sex, gender, and the presumably impending...
Thursday Morning Linkage
It's morning somewhere right? With military action possibly pending in Syria amidst a horrible ongoing civil war, I needed a more hopeful photo to accompany this post of news links (hence the duck and the kitten). But, the news out there is pretty grim so here are some links on Syria, the links...