Our next Bridging the Gap Book Nook features Tom Long of the University of Warwick. He discusses his new Oxford University Press book, A Small State's Guide to Influence in World Politics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glKAammexM8
This is a guest post by Betcy Jose and Alessa Sänger. Jose is currently a Fellow in the Cluster of Excellence: Formation of Normative Orders at Goethe University. Sänger is pursuing a Master Degree...
Pope Francis recently visited the United Arab Emirates (UAE). His trip is historic, not just because it's the first by the head of the Roman Catholic Church. He will also lead an outdoor mass, the...
The following is a guest post by Carla Martinez Machain, Michael Allen, Michael E. Flynn, and Andrew Stravers. One week ago, National Security Adviser John Bolton appeared at a White House briefing...
A few weeks ago we saw a nasty eruption of the should "progressives vote for Obama" debate--prompted, ironically enough, by a libertarian columnist. My reaction at the time was rather short. But I feel moved by Russel Arben Fox's explanation of why he's voting Green, albeit in Kansas, and the...
tl;dr notice: 1200 words. Zack Beauchamp points us to Douglas Feith's latest broadside against the administration with the tweet: LOL Feith cites @slaughteram and Sam Power's jobs as evidence that Obama wanted to limit American use of military force It turns out that the absurdity runs far deeper...
George W Bush practically built his re-election effort against John Kerry on the idea that even if you disagreed with him, you consistently knew where he stood on stuff. That commercial above is famous. And the US right in general loves that sort of macho grandstanding on behalf of American will...
Democrats are struggling to explain the math behind the Romney-Ryan tax cut proposal. Such forest-for-the-trees stuff isn't really helping. They need to make the big argument: Romney's policies are the same failed policies offered during the Bush Administration, and here's why Obama's proposals...
(Here and here is the previous Duck debate on this.) The EU? Over a guy regularly facing down death-threats, bullying, and intimidation from one of the worst dictators on earth? Boo to the Nobel Committee for missing this obvious choice. If they can give the prize to the drone-warrior with a...
Greetings, Duck Followers. I’m Amanda – assistant professor at Mizzou, avid hiker, crazy sci-fi romance novel reader, and pretty competent mother. I’m excited to be a new “duckling” on the block. On the eve of the next US presidential debate, I’ll go out on a limb and guess that the dire human...
This is of interest only to international-relations theorists and fellow travelers. A long-standing claims about hegemonic orders is that they are normative ones: that a dominant power uses a wide variety of power resources to create a set of international rules and regimes conducive to its...
Along with the face-lift come some new faces to the Duck. Well, new names anyway. We recruited this year based on the desire to increase diversity on the blog, particularly in methodology and area expertise; and also to cover some staple topics while one or more permanent contributors (myself...
Analysis of the Chinese 052D Luyang III-class destroyer. David Schorr's April "resolve fairy" post that almost certainly influenced my account of the Romney-Ryan doctrine. Will Romney escalate tensions with China? More on the Iranian-supplied Hezbollah drone downed by Israel. Against Pakistani...
The initial reaction from Facebook and from my Realist friends reveals a certain amount of scorn for the Nobel Peace Prize announcement this morning. The EU today is an easy parody and I guess the response is to be expected. Nonetheless, I appreciate Erik Voeten’s post that Dan linked below and...
As I've mentioned before, one of the projects that I'm working on now is a book provisionally entitled "The Politics of the Hunger Games." PM and I are overdue in submitting a full proposal to the press. In an earlier post I sketched out some provisional chapter titles. Here I provide a more...
I scored the Romney-Obama debate as a tactical win for Romney. As of now, it looks more like a strategic one. The lesson for me, I think, is not to assess the political ramifications of debates. So in this post, I'll simply stick to reflecting on the foreign-policy component of the debate, which...