Christopher Clary on his new book, which looks at why international rivalry is a hard habit to break.
6+1 Questions about The Difficult Policies of Peace: Rivalry in Modern South Asia
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Recent Posts
Duckies Reminder
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. Just a reminder that nominations for the Duckies (Online...
IR Theory After Trump: A First Image Renaissance? Part II
This is the second of two guest posts ]by Eric Parajon, Richard Jordan, and Marcus Holmes. The first can be found here. In our last post, we explored recent TRIP survey data illustrating that...
IR Theory After Trump: A First Image Renaissance? Part I
This is a guest post, the first of two, by Eric Parajon, Richard Jordan, and Marcus Holmes. Eric Parajon is a recent graduate of William & Mary and currently a Project Manager for the Teaching,...
More Recent Posts
Missed That! Korea-Japan Treaty Debacle Edition
Japan-Korea treaty killed by Seoul at last minute about a week ago.Jennifer Lind provides a quick explanation:East Asia, where states don't even need to practice wedge politics to bring about division.....
Friday Nerd Blogging
'Game of Thrones': The Board Game -- powered by Cracked.comH/T Rob Farley.
Fear of Relativism part two: the appearance of contradiction
[The following essay, to be posted here in three parts over several days, was solicited by and is cross-posted at e-ir. Part one appeared here. Thanks to Aaron McKeil for editorial input and html formatting assistance.] II. The Appearance of ContradictionFrom this brief example we can draw a few...
Fear of Relativism part one: from a certain point of view
[The following essay, to be posted here in three parts over the next several days, was solicited by and is cross-posted at e-ir. Thanks to Aaron McKeil for editorial input and html formatting assistance.]The dominant methodological position in the field of IR—neopositivism[1]—has almost certainly...
Area Political Scientist Armed Only with Words Thwarts Robbery
THE CANARD"All the fake news that's fit to print."--South BostonPhotograph by Matt GratiasArea political scientist Joseph Nye of Harvard University emerged Sunday as a hero, thwarting an attempted robbery at a local convenience store. Suspected robber Donnie McFlanagan was pointing a sawed-off...
More Evidence for the Underlying Theory of the “Reset”
The basic theory behind the Obama Administration's "Reset" policy was that US-Russian relations could be disaggregated: that it is possible for two countries to disagree on a range of issues and still cooperate on matters of common interest. That bet looks to be correct; despite a significant...
A Derecho Note
Blogging might be sporadic for some of the Duck of Minerva team. Here's why:The WTOP slideshow is worth a look, as is its explanation of the particular weather phenomenon involved.We have a generator, but it doesn't run our air conditioning. Oh, well.At least we have it better than the poor folks...
Speaking of Retrenchment
Christopher Preble has a solid critical review of Robert Kagan's new book at The National Interest. Preble is particularly concerned with the free-rider problem:EVEN THOSE inclined to believe Kagan’s assessment of the international system and America’s role in it must contend with one central fact...
Friday Nerd Blogging
H/T Steve.
Russia and Syria
Dan Drezner asks "Dear realists: please explain Russia":I raise all of this because a few days ago Charles Clover in the Financial Times wrote an interesting story about Russia's foreign policy in Syria:A respected Moscow-based military think tank has published a report that is likely to fuel more...
Retrenchment and the US Alliance System
Robert drove a great deal of traffic to the Duck with his provocative posts on retrenchment and US alliances. His efforts to "grade" allies by strategic importance has led to some interesting results and fascinating discussions. But I think he's working with an overly narrow view of what alliances...
Academic IR and the Information Age: Journals
As my post on "open access" demonstrates, I've been thinking a lot about International Relations journals over the last few months, particularly with respect to digital media. Charli's excellent presentation on the discipline and "web 2.0" fell at an interesting time for me, as I was working on a...