The University of Chicago’s Paul Poast claims that G. Lowes Dickinson is was the OG “modern” theo…
Episode 26: Anarchy vs. The Anarchy
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Recent Posts
Shaming without naming: Why is the international community not calling out human rights violators?
This is a guest post by Theresa Squatrito, Assistant Professor at the London School of Economics, Magnus Lundgren, Postdoctoral Researcher at Stockholm University, and Thomas Sommerer, Associate...
What do new Turkish university campuses have to do with Trump’s Syria decision?
So by this point we all know the big news on Syria. Overnight, Trump announced that--after consulting with Turkish President Erdogan--the US would be pulling troops out of north Syria, giving Turkey...
Episode 4 – Jelena Subotic
elena Subotic of Georgia State University is an accomplished scholar of International Relations who focuses on the politics of memory and identity, transitional justice,...
More Recent Posts
Thursday evening linkage
Happy Valentine's Day Duckies! Here are a few interesting links on love and gender. First, for those of you feeling completely clueless when it comes to romance, the Huffington Post put up a list of Five Courses about Sex and Love, including "Beyond Hooking Up: Creating Meaningful Relationships"...
It’s a trap. No, really, IT’S A TRAP.
Change you can believe in. Or is it a trap? So our little geekfest-in-a-teacup has provoked, among other things, some additional contributions by members of The Duck focusing on additional ways that the Empire's command structure and Imperial strategy towards the Rebel Alliance doesn't make a lot...
Delegation Leads to Shirking, Shirking Leads to Failure …
and Failure leads to Fear, Anger and all that Stuff. In the renewed discussion of the Battle of Hoth and other failures of the Galactic Empire, there is a running theme throughout many of the posts: how does a leader get the underlings to do what they are supposed to do. Given the affinity...
5 Biggest Strategic Errors of the Emperor: a Contribution to the ‘Battle of Hoth’ Debate
You can’t win a counter-insurgency with a military like this The Duck has gotten into an excellent debate with Ackerman on the Empire’s blown opportunity to stamp out the Space Vietcong Rebellion at Hoth. Westmoreland spent 5 years trying to nail down the VC in set-piece battles where US...
When does social change happen? Revisiting How to Survive a Plague
With the Oscars fast approaching, one documentary How to Survive a Plague is a likely winner (though may lose out to my second favorite documentary of the year Searching for Sugar Man). How to Survive a Plague is, as I described in my earlier review, an emotionally redolent account of ACT UP's...
The Force is strong with this one
Episode I: Spencer Ackerman over at Danger Room posts this analysis of the Battle of Hoth. Episode II: 90 e-mails and twelve hours later, this symposium goes up on the Danger Room website including a contribution by our own Dan Nexon. Unfortunately, not all of us involved in the furious e-mail...
A Short History and Critique of Climate Negotiations: All Climate Politics is Local
I gave a guest lecture for undergraduates on the state of global climate negotiations yesterday for a law school colleague here at the University of Texas. In light of the president's strong but ambiguous comments in the State of the Union last night threatening executive action if the Congress...
The Arab Spring and Securitization Theory
This is a guest post by Jarrod Hayes. Jarrod is Assistant Professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs. He received his PhD in Politics and International Relations from the University of Southern California in 2009. His research broadly focuses on the social construction of foreign...
Lunch-Time Linkage
Japan's "looming singularity." Xavier Marquez has lots of infographics about the "normativeness of democracy." The nuke content in Obama SOTU address. I'm skeptical of both the feasibility and utility of further nuclear arms control with the Russian Federation, but I'm down with...
Current Political Scientist to Congress: Please Ignore Greg Ferenstein
Another day, another op-ed or blog post saying that the social sciences contribute nothing and that we must be more policy-centric or policy-relevant or policy-synergistic or policy-policy-policy-policy. You know, it's funny. I've just finished reading a history of Bell labs (these journalistic...
Tuesday Morning Linkage Club
Tim Burke suggests ways to fix the dissertation, but I'm skeptical that the way to reduce the overproduction of Ph.D.s is to lower the costs of earning a Ph.D. [Easily Distracted] Will Moore wonders what the standard for presenting results as a consensus is; a response to Voeten and Nexon. Via...
What Patterns of Trade Might Tell us About the Democratic Peace
Stop me if you've heard this one: it appears that wars between pairs of democracies are relatively rare compared to wars between other pairs of states. Some people even think this relationship might be causal. In the decades since this empirical regularity first got everyone's attention, a number...