In this “Whiskey Optional” episode, PTJ facilitates a conversation among four colleagues from dif…
Episode 23: Being Academic and Pandemic Time
read more
Recent Posts
Take Me to Church
There is a spat of ecumenical proportions brewing in the Eastern hemisphere: Patriarch Krill of Russia stopped praying for the Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople. The reason for that is simple:...
Ignorance of the Ivory Tower: What Do the Profs Know About the Military
I woke up to find a piece that castigates the academic world for being ignorant about the armed forces. My reaction was: I love how broad this brush is. "I talked to some folks who are profs and...
Mentorship as Activism – Remembering Dr. Lee Ann Fujii
Great opportunity to donate in memory of a beloved scholar of African politics. The Lee Ann Fujii Minority Fellows Program Travel Grants will help up to 15 scholars from underrepresented backgrounds...
More Recent Posts
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
<img alt="" galleryimg="no" onload="var downlevelDiv = document.getElementById('4050f2d5-ac8f-40e4-b01c-f6efcd5c7932'); downlevelDiv.innerHTML = "";"...
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...
A Dothraki Complaint
Drogo as angry brown man.Source: dothraki.orgGraddakh! We the brown people of Vaes Dothrak collectively curse the producers of HBO and the slanderous "creator" of our world, which you call the Game of Thrones. We know that your people have a long standing tradition of questionable and...
What’s So ‘Institutional’ @ Historical Institutionalism?
NOTE: The following was actually written before Dan Nexon posted a good piece on exactly the same essay. I’m not sure if that coincidence means anything, but here’s my take: ----------------------------------------- So I just read Orfeo Fioretos’ “Historical Institutionalism in International...
Institutionalizing Atrocity Prevention
I'm sure there will be plenty of skeptics, but President Obama's speech this morning at the U.S. Holocaust Museum (see Charli's post below) and today's first meeting of the atrocity prevention board at the White House is a positive development. For the past twenty years -- since the beginning of...
‘Bleg’: How Long are your ‘Revise & Resubmit’ Letters to the Editor?
I have been asked to revise and resubmit an article submitted for an IR journal. But it’s a big r&r; the editor even said it would be “a great deal of work” (groan). While I must make the changes to the ms, I must also submit a letter to the editors and reviewers to explain my changes. That’s...
Two certification systems
The keynote address for this year's NITLE Symposium was delivered by Dan Cohen, a major voice in the "digital humanities" movement and one of the leading figures behind Zotero, the open-source free EndNote killer research tool. Cohen outlined a vision of 'Net-enabled scholarly publishing that I...
Interstellar Relations: A New Old Course At Georgetown
This is a shameless bleg to two different audiences.The first, and immediately more important, is undergraduate students who might like to take a serious course about international relations, political science, and science fiction this summer. During the first summer term, I'm picking up Dan's...