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An American died in an Egyptian jail. Why didn’t this well-connected human rights community speak out?
Earlier this week, Mustafa Kassem, an American held in Egypt, died. The Trump Administration did little to help him. That wasn't surprising. What was surprising was that the international religious...
Twilight of Hope
Last year I attended the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of Parties (CoP) for the first time. It was an experience in dichotomies. The events on the...
Audit Culture in UK Higher Education
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...
More Recent Posts
So, we’re at ISA
Posting will be light.
The worst questions to be asked at a conference
The following is a guest post by Peter Henne. -- Once again, the International Studies Association annual meeting is upon us, followed by the Midwest Political Science Association conference. It's a good bet that most readers of the Duck will be attending one or both of these, or other upcoming...
Monday Morning Linkage
Good Morning Duckies... Happy April Fool's Day. Here are some stories which we didn't make up just for this day...: Nicholas Sarkozy will soon be an employee of Qatar. The four year long battle for the Euro is not over. The top US adviser in Afghanistan is a former kebab restaurant owner from...
Nation’s international relations reference librarians despondent as Game of Thrones returns
The Canard "All the fake news that's fit to print" The long awaited return of HBO’s wildly popular fantasy series, the Game of Thrones, has not generated enthusiasm on the part of at least one group. The nation’s international relations reference librarians, those who help students and members of...
Small Modular Reactors and US Military Bases
Bear with me, because this post has a long backstory. As many of you know, I'm a former policy debater. Indeed, so are a number of guest and permanent bloggers at the Duck of Minerva. And not a few other international-relations scholars. Well, this weekend is the National Debate Tournament (NDT),...
Friday Nerd Blogging: Globalization Edition
Why show a trailer for an Indian zombie movie? Two reasons: it has the word globalization in it; and it helped me make it to the Final Four of Twitter Fight Club 2013. To newbies, the first rule of #TFC13 is to talk about it. So, check out the competition of the international security wonks, and...
Jeffrey C. Isaac on the NSF and Political Science
In a piece that's bound to generate controversy among political scientists, Isaac looks at the "big picture" of the defunding of (many forms of) political science via the Coburn Amendment. What's likely controversial about the piece? First, Isaac argues that the defunding of political science is...
Debating the Benefits of Nuclear Superiority for Crisis Bargaining, Part IV
Editor's Note: Back in February I riffed on a post by Erik Voeten in which Erik discussed two articles in International Organization (IO). One, by our colleague Matt Kroenig, argued that nuclear superiority gives states advantages in crisis bargaining (PDF). Another, by Todd Sechser and Matthew...
Did You Know that WMD is DMW Spelled Backwards?
Herbert Marcuse had some interesting things to say about certain political acronyms. The meaning is fixed, doctored, loaded. Once it has become an official vocable, constantly repeated in general usage, "sanctioned" by the intellectuals, it has lost all cognitive value and serves merely for...
Friday Morning Linkage
Joshua Goldstein and I look at R2P After Syria. But, what will Syria look like after Syria? And, what exactly is the Obama administration doing there? Training and arming the rebels covertly but not with non-lethal military aid -- body armor and night vision. UN arms treaty blocked by Iran, North...
Guest Post by Tom Nichols — Iraq War Debate too Driven by Bush Resentment: A Response to Bob Kelly’s Iraq Posts”
I am happy to invite my friend Tom Nichols to guest-post about the continuing Iraq War debate. Tom responded so substantially to my original post series on the war (one, two, three), that I invited him to provide a longer write-up. Tom is a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval...
Rule Number One For Graduate School Applicants
Spring (where it exists) is the time of year when applicants to PhD programs find out the outcome and decide where, if any place, to go. While there are many factors that one must take into account, including what might happen if your preferred adviser leaves (Will Moore's take and mine),...