Jarrod is joined by Daniela Lai and Adam Lerner to talk about the role of big questions in IR scholarship and teaching.
Does IR ask big questions?
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Recent Posts
Call for Guest Posts: How Should the Discipline Change?
We are going to begin calls for contributions to thematic series. The Monkey Cage for example had a terrific series on the gender gap in political science. The first in our call for contributions is...
Wait…what about Iran?
Remember this summer, when we were about to go to war with Iran? Iran seized an oil tanker passing through the Persian Gulf. Iran also shot down a US drone. The United States responded by shooting...
Moscow in the Meddle
Between the burning Amazon and burning Siberia, Brexit clustercoitus and Hurricane Dorian, there is still some space in the tired news cycle for the tear gas in Hong Kong and broken limbs in Moscow...
More Recent Posts
In the year 2000….
Hi everyone. I haven’t been around much lately as I’ve been furiously writing a book. But it is almost done and I’m feeling reflective. Have you missed me? I’ve missed you. What’s that you say? Why yes, this is a new shirt. Thank you for noticing. I thought that I would offer some thoughts about...
Leader Comebacks
"This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." So spoke Winston Churchill, after the Allied victory in the Second Battle of El Alamein. We could say much the same of his defeat in the 1945 general election. A core assumption...
Guest Blogger News
We have two exciting developments to report concerning guest bloggers at the Duck. First, Adrienne LeBas' From Protest to Parties: Party-Building and Democratization in Africa (Oxford University Press, 2011) has been awarded "Best Book in African Politics" at the 2012 African Studies Association...
Tuesday Morning Linkage
Dan's still ill so you're stuck with me for Day Two. Here's some links: Via The Monkey Cage (I'm not stealing, I'm curating) comes this link to an Inside Higher Ed article about the five-year humanities Ph.D.. Identity, legacy, institutions, and Indiana basketball One of the things that grabs me...
What I Did Not Know About the Prof Business
In the recent conversations about Policy PhDs and such, one of the frequent assertions was that people going into PhD programs had no idea what they were getting into. Why do we assert such things? All I can say is that I had no clue not just about what was involved in a PhD program, but also...
Human rights NGOs: Just Hot Air?
Charli’s posts on Human Rights Watch and Autonomous Weapons got me thinking: should we really expect human rights international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to influence weapons systems? On the whole, human rights NGOs are a pretty powerless lot: NGOs don’t control military resources...
Monday Morning Linkage
Dan's sick, so he's asked me to put together three to five links ... of doom! Unfortunately, I've been writing a lot recently and so I've missed out on great posts. So here's what I found in a burst of searching; please suggest additional links in the comments. At Foreign Policy, Jack...
Follow Up on Academic-Policy Divide
As it turns out, there are a group of scholars working to bridge this divide. Check out the Bridging the Gap Project. The project has programs for new and not-so-new scholars in the US and abroad. This seems to be exactly what we need. Take a look and consider applying (soon since the Dec 5...
World AIDS Day 2012: A Moment for Optimism?
Today is World AIDS Day, an annual opportunity to take stock of the state of the epidemic. Despite a decade of incredible mobilization of finance for and visibility of the AIDS pandemic, UNAIDS estimated that the number of new infections last year 2.5 million still far outstripped the 1.4 million...
Saturday Morning Linkage
A weak "contrarian" post from Daveed Gartenstein-Ross on Tom Rick's appearance on Fox News. Watch Daveed flail further in comments. Defence Talk: Pakistan test fires a nuclear-capable ballistic missile and hackers target IAEA. More on the latter from Jeffrey Lewis. Vitalist metaphors for the PhD...
Africa for Norway
This video from Africa for Norway provides a humorous way to think about foreign aid: I suppose there is a good chance readers have already seen the video -- more than 1.5 million people have viewed it on youtube.
Podcast No. 14 – Interview with Michael J. Tierney
The fourteenth Duck of Minerva podcast features Michael J. Tierney.