It’s no surprise that current events regularly lead us to update our syllabi. That doesn’t mean we can’t make “surprise” an important feature of our courses.
Our syllabi should be full of surprises
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Recent Posts
Understanding Israel
This is a guest post from Brent Sasley, Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Arlington. He tweets at @besasley. Israel holds a prominent place in the American popular imagination. It’s...
Game of Thrones and Alliance Politics
I saw this tweet and could not help but respond: I enjoyed @mchorowitz on GoT Dragon airpower, but it’s time for @RyanGrauer to give the people what they want- an analysis of how Westerosi alliance...
Clarifying Classic Confusions for IR students
An amazing series of tweets must be re-posted here so that IR profs everywhere can use them for syllabi and for the first day of class. A grateful nation owes Herb Carmen, former naval...
More Recent Posts
Ducklings!
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...
Monday Morning Linkage
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...
EU and the Peace Prize (Round 2)
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...
The Politics of the Hunger Games
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...
Friday Morning Debate Reaction
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...
The EU Peace Prize
Erik Voeten is pleased: The Realist argument about the importance of the U.S. security umbrella is probably correct. Yet, the dire predictions regarding the future of European integration have yet to materialize. Indeed, the EU sped up its integration considerably with the end of the Cold War;...
Announcement: The Duck of Minerva is Moving (UPDATED)
Update: the Duck has moslty migrated (and that sentence makes sense in a non-technical context! Score!). Comment migration is in process, so probably not a good time for a magnum opus response. The existing RSS feed should work, so no need to change that. Vikash designed our new banner. The...
Podcast No. 11 – Interview with Janice Bially Mattern
Featuring Janice Bially Mattern. From 2012.
Friday Morning Linkage
Georgetown University's debate coach comments (video) on the first presidential debate of 2012. PM's not the only one to respond to John Quiggin's post on the US Navy; Robert Farley also has a lot to say. Jeremy Keenan provides an overview of the Mali civil war at allAfrica. The Syrian civil war...
Stuff Political Scientists Like #17: Outside Offers, or Stuff Other Political Scientists Like
Political scientists like to complain about how little they are paid, which tends to be irritating to any number of other groups, most notably anyone who has a job other than that of a political scientist and has to be into the office say, before noon. Part of the reason that political scientists...
Does naval success invalidate the need for navies?
Acting was a big part of Battleship. At Crooked Timber, John Quiggin writes a post that seeks to sink a thousand ships: The trillions of dollars that have been spent on building, maintaining and scrapping fleets since 1945 has yielded almost zero benefits to the nations that have spent this money,...
Gender, Violence, War, Political Memory
The sailor (George Mendosa) and nurse (Greta Zimmer Friedman) depicted in this iconic photo snapped moments after the announcement that World War II had ended turned out to be complete strangers, and apparently Greta Friedman, the nurse, wasn't kissing back: Mendosa: "It was the moment. You come...