When it comes to quantitative data in conflict studies, standards for collection, reliability, ethics, and usage remain behind the curve. We discuss five things that scholars can do to address these gaps.
Scholarly work is often written to deadline—the contribution to an edited volume, the essay for a journal’s special issue, and the book review are all going to be fit into someone else’s bigger...
In under two weeks, Brazil will have the second round of its presidential election. Former military officer and fan of fascists Jair Bolsonaro looks set after a strong first-round showing to defeat...
Over the weekend, fellow guest contributor Luke Perez had an interesting post on whether we need to include the grand paradigms of international relations (realism, liberalism, and constructivism)...
Foreign Policy just published its latest issue online. The letters section includes a response that expands on my earlier blog post calling the recent "Sex" issue a Teen Magazine. For those interested in reading further, my letter points FP editors to a wider range of scholarship and contributors...
One of the most unsettling findings of our media and radicalisation research was the way in which the suffering of certain individual women is turned into a cause by radical Islamic groups that leads to violence by men in those women’s names. The availability of digital media, combined with a...
As part of a now lengthy chain (one, two, three, four) on US allies and the likelihood of US retrenchment, I argued that American hegemony, despite America’s huge debt and deficit, is more financially stable than almost anyone expected. Because foreigners’ appetite for dollars seems unquenchable...
Not long ago, Robert Elias, a Professor of Politics at University of San Francisco (and editor of Peace Review), published The Empire Strikes Out: How Baseball Sold U.S. Foreign Policy & Promoted the American Way Abroad (The New Press, 2010). Unfortunately, I have not yet had a chance to obtain a...
Can China create the next Steve Jobs? The New Yorker discusses a quasi-official Chinese attempt to find the next Steve Jobs--a sort of Apprentice with less Donald Trump and more pseudo-Confucian standards. As the New Yorker reporter Jiayang Fan writes, there is something bizarre in the contest....
Colin Kahl sent me a list of recent work he's done on the US-Iran standoff. The first is a CNAS report, Risk and Rivalry: Iran, Israel, and the Bomb (PDF). The abstract:As Iran's nuclear progress continues and negotiations fail to reach a breakthrough, the threat of an Israeli preventive strike on...
As if controversies over graphic sex, gratuitous nudity and rat torture weren't enough, now this. Yep, that's George W. Bush's head on a spike, in the Game of Thrones Season 1 scene where Joffrey torments his fiance Sansa by forcing her to view various decapitated heads.Fans didn't actually catch...
I've been meaning to write substantive posts about my recent trip to Taiwan, but between the time change, conference prep, and getting sick, I haven't had the time. In the interim, I found a video of the knife-making process at Maester Wu knives on Kinmen. Kinmen (aka Jinmen aka Quemoy) was...
A standard critical argument in my field looks something like this:1. Phenomenon X involves A assumptions about the world;2. Approach Y contains assumptions inconsistent with A; therefore3. Y cannot be used to understand X.In some instances, and given some specific conditions, this can be a...
For the small percentage of our readership that doesn't overlap with that of the Monkey Cage, see its roundup on her passing and a guest post there by Rick Wilson.
I found the above image here. A hat-tip goes to Andrew Sullivan for referencing this debate yet a second time.Here is part one of my response to two recent, heavily-trafficked posts (one, two) on hypothetical retrenchment under Ron Paul. (So yes, that makes 4 total posts, including this one.) I...
Slate posted a piece on the academic study of pop culture. It found that academics studied Buffy the Vampire Slayer most. Well, actually, no, it found that more folks studied the Buffy than the Matrix, the Simpsons, Aliens or The Wire.This led to a Facebook discussion of selection bias. We can...