In 2014, John Mearsheimer authored a Foreign Affairs article in which he blamed that year’s Ukrai…
Episode 22: So a Deputy Foreign Minister and an Academic Realist Walk into a Bar…
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Recent Posts
Backlash and Stigma: Rethinking Restraint in the Age of Trump
This is a guest post from Eric Van Rythoven. Eric Van Rythoven recently finished his PhD at Carleton University studying emotion, world politics, and security. His work is published in Security...
Advice for the New Professor
As August accelerates and academics panic as their summer dreams/plans meet the harsh reality that one usually does not get done all that they want to do, it is time to give unsolicited advice to...
Remembering Robert Gilpin and His Intellectual Legacy
This is a guest post from Peter Henne, Assistant Professor at the University of Vermont. Robert Gilpin passed away recently. Most of us knew him as the author of War and Change in World Politics....
More Recent Posts
If Gays Can Fight, Shouldn’t Women?
Now that Don't Ask Don't Tell (DADT) has been removed, does this mean that women are next on the equality/integration agenda?The answer to this question seemed to be yes, when this week when the Pentagon announced the removal of restrictions for some 14,000 military jobs that were previously...
Autonomous Arms Control?
Now that this academic year’s loose ends are wrapped up, it is time to refocus attention on the important topic of norm development around autonomous weapons. Fortunately for my case study there is much developing on this front, in addition to developments in adjacent but (I argue) distinct issue...
Friday Nerd Blogging
7 things I don’t like @ being an Academic
This genre is growing on the Duck, so here are are a few more thoughts before you take the PhD plunge. Enjoy your last summer to read as you choose, without following a peer reviewer or a syllabus. Such lost bliss… Generally speaking, yes, I like being an academic. I like ideas and reading. I like...
The World Does its Duty & Conforms to Social Science: More on Korea & Japan
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Doctoral Pedagogy on the Theory / Policy Divide
I am concluding a semester-long experiment in incorporating a theory/policy writing simulation of sorts into my doctoral level "Human Security" seminar. This struck me as important both because my own doctoral training left me unprepared for writing for practitioners, and because the divergent...
The Global Right Wing
My new book, The Global Right Wing and the Clash of World Politics, has recently been published by Cambridge University Press. It is available on Kindle for $12.10, Nook for $14.74, and as a paperback for $21.59. For a free chapter, chapter excerpts, contents, and more please visit my...
The Quiet Assassin of European Democracy
Herman Von Rompuy is going to steal your sovereignty.Also, Christmas.There is something refreshing in British newspapers. Empires come and empires go, but tabloids are one of life's constants. So with the Express, which has discovered "EU Plot To Scrap Britain": The new bureaucrat, who would not...
Oliver North threat-inflates for the next ‘Modern Warfare’: a new Low for the Military-Industrial-Entertainment Complex
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What Foreign Policy Did Right. (And Other Stuff.)
In lieu of friday nerd blogging last week (which I saw Vikash had covered) Rob Farley and I blogged heads about gender in Foreign Policy, gender and race in Game of Thrones, and popular culture in foreign affairs. [Warning: There are some mild and at least one not-so-mild TV and book spoilers in...
Why don’t Korea and Japan Align, even though IR says they should?
For awhile I was collecting links and such to make an argument about Korea and Japan working together on big issues like China and NK, or finally clinching the much-discussed but little worked-on FTA. Both the realist and the liberal in me wanted to see two liberal democracies working together in...
Ambiguity of “Decision”
This post started off as a reply to a comment under Robert Kelly's post on historical institutionalism, but it got so long I thought it deserved its own post.There is a great deal of ambiguity in how we use the term "decision" in contemporary IR, an ambiguity that also infects the closely related...