This has been either a bad week for Israel, or a great week for Israel, depending on whom you ask or what your Twitter feed looks like. In the end, this may matter more for the relevance and impact of Middle East studies than anything else.
Many a postdoc are likely in my position this year, dissertation defense safely in the review mirror and settling into the groove of their research. Those who, like me, are fortunately enough to...
This post comes from Bridging the Gap co-director Jordan Tama, Associate Professor at the School of International Service at American University. American presidents have typically been more...
I feel like I should say something about the disappearance—and likely assassination—of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi. This tragedy was enabled by America’s permissive stance towards Saudi Crown...
Just say no to theory.Parents: Are you worried that your college students aren't interested in the real world anymore? Are they growing distant from conversations about foreign policy at the dinner table? Are your college students getting involved with international relations theory? Could it lead...
2012 interview with Ted Hopf.
Praeger has published a new two-volume compendium on arms control edited by Robert Williams Jr. and Paul R.Viotti. If you're writing anything on the subject of arms, weapons advocacy or national security governance Volume 1, at least, is a pretty helpful resource - especially if you have research...
A crass, gaudy, all-American display.Someone named Steven Walt has published an article, wildly posted on the Internet, entitled “The Myth of American Exceptionalism”. I don’t know who Mr. Walt is, but the bio says he is a professor at Harvard University. Unfortunately we are seeing too much of...
Another victory for Team Wonderbread. Mitt Romney's selection of Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wisc.) means that he has scored a PR coup and won the all-important mid-August weekend news cycle. What can you say about the pick but the obvious? Ryan is the most inspiring vice-presidential candidate since Jack...
Dan and PTJ discuss “the End of IR Theory.”
Last week, I embedded with smart people thinking hard about ethics, armed conflict and emerging technologies. I learned that it's an open questions whether governments can or should move toward fully autonomous systems; I learned philosophers, technicians and lawyers approach these questions so...
Hawai'i isn't the only colonial possessionto get the inset treatment. Although the authors of the Duck of Minerva do not condone, endorse, or even take seriously this proposal, we do want to bring to our readers' attention a petition urging President Obama to return Taiwan to the Emperor of...
When Usain competes, U.S. aid plummets. At Andrew Sullivan's Daily Beast, Patrick Appel offers a few hypotheses about why Americans seem to care less about the killing of Sikhs than the killing of moviegoers, including the observation that the timing of the Milwaukee shootings so soon after the...
One of the more interesting issues raised informally during the time I spent at the Lincoln Center's Emerging Technologies Workshop was the relative likelihood of developments in lethal autonomous robotics leading to fully autonomous armies: that is, eliminating the human presence from...
Phil Arena has been playing around with alternative measures of military power. He begins with the straightforward observation that one current and popular measure of military power, the CINC scores in the Correlates of War project, list the United States as having fallen behind the People's...
Adam Elkus and Kelsey Atherton discuss strategic studies and speculative fiction.