What are the answers?
One of the basic claims I make as a poli sci professor is that my goal is to help the next generation become more informed citizens, so that they understand their interests, and can vote...
I'm not much for New Year's resolutions, but I just listened to Pod Save America's resolutions podcast. Ana Marie Cox was a guest and talked about her approach to New Year's resolutions. She talked...
This is a guest post from Brent Sasley, Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Arlington and chair of the ISA Online Media Caucus. ISA 2019 is coming up fast, so it’s time to start...
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.
Regular blogging will begin to resume over the next weeks now that I'm back from a family road trip down the eastern seaboard and starting to gear up for the academic year. In the meantime, of possible interest to Duck readers is this terrific exhibit on The Art of Video Games at the Smithsonian...
I get a lot of emails asking for advice about putting together their graduate-school applications. I also get a lot of emails asking how to "improve" an application to make it "more competitive." I suspect that these emails come to me because I am Director of Admissions in the Government...
Per Dan's post below, I don't understand why Russia is our number-one enemy, either today or ten years from now. Neither, it seems, do Americans, who have only noticed Russia's phantom menace at one period in the past several years--immediately after the invasion of Georgia in 2008. Below, polling...
I am happy to guest post my friend Dave Kang of the University of Southern California. I think Dave’s work on east Asia and IR theory is excellent; I would start with this or this if you’re interested. REKConfucian North KoreaFigure 1. Korean Worker’s Party symbolIt is easy to caricature North...
2012 interview with Phil Arena.