This post is the first in a four part symposium on the Cuban Missile Crisis, one of the the most studied cases of IR. With the release of documents in recent decades, historical revisions have challenged the received wisdom informed by mainstream...
In 2016 I took a job at university in the UK. As an American, British academic culture was new to me, especially its ‘audit culture’. The key elements of audit culture are mechanisms for the...
We've all spent the weekend processing the killing of Iranian official Qassim Suleimani by a US airstrike. While this is obviously very important, we should think about a secondary implication of...
Depending on your Twitter addiction, you either went to sleep or woke up with the news that America had assassinated Qassim Suleimani, the commander of Iran's Quds force. Suleimani was one of the...
If you belong to APSA, you probably got the email announcing the last-minute closure of the Ralph Bunche Summer Institute because of the Coburn (left) amendment. Undergraduate programming like this is obviously pretty vulnerable. It doesn’t have the cachet of high-profile, ‘big think’ research....
I'm passing along some ideas from Brian Matzke, a Ph.D. student in the Department of English at the University of Michigan. Making social rules and expectations explicit is a big part of contemporary classroom management, and this document is a good starting point for other instructors developing...
I've learned to limit consumption of Tom Friedman, except when he talks about the Middle East...yesterday his column suggested that the Arab Spring should be renamed in light of recent events...I think he is on to something, but I doubt his suggestion of "The Arab Quarter Century" will fly...my...
Here is your Thursday Morning Linkage! Algal bloom kills 240 of Florida's 5000 manatees (cause of death: natural toxin) Madonna smacked down by Malawi government after her recent visit Shale gas and methane leaks, greener than coal but by how much? Obama tells donors that the politics of the...
And I bet that you all thought that I'd completely forgotten.... Robert Farley on the lessons of the Falklands War... for the PLA-N. Adam Elkus ruminates on the relationship between theory and math. Robert Murray: IR Theory and North Korea. Patrick M. Morgan's award-winning article: "The State of...
"My main job [as an assistant professor at insert-flyover-university-here] is advising presidential policy on public religious life." I actually heard a Ph.D. tell his neighbor that on an airplane. I know that there might be more worthwhole topics for my first post in months (I haven't been a...
My own thinking on the current Korea flap is on The Diplomat. I argue it’s a faux crisis, which promptly got me accused of being an air-head academic in the comment section. Lovely. I was also pleased to respond to Kim Jong Un’s threat that I should leave the country. And I managed not to explode...
Despite the lack of an update at its website, I am now the Chair of the International Studies Association (ISA) Theory Section. Obviously, all ISA members should join and contribute $5 to our budget. But the reason for this post is that we've promised public discussion of the wording of our new...
Robert Farley's post last week about how long the journal publication process is struck a chord. One of my journal articles took three years from submission to appearance and was gated (I had to get my own piece through inter-library loan since it came out and the library didn't have a...
Good Mornin' Ducks! Here are some links on the crise du jour... Tim Shorrock discusses what what the US media is missing in its coverage of North Korea on FAIR's CounterSpin. (MP3 Podcast at 9.30 - 18:25) Kongdan Oh discusses how to understand North Korea and the "Republic of Pyongyang" on...
Practically the whole roster of Duck bloggers is out at the biggest IR conference of the year--the ISA Conference is in San Francisco this year--leaving this think tank Duck in DC alone and further pondering the divide between the policy and academic worlds. In light of this cri de coeur from a...
I am currently at the ISA of Madness. Near the top of the list of insanity is the Blogging Reception, which included an overflow crowd and some great "spoken blog posts" by Erica Chenoweth, Rob Farley, Amanda Murdie, and Dan Drezner. I recorded the event, and whatever the camera caught before the...