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6+1 Questions about ANATOMY OF TORTURE
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Recent Posts
The most frequently used ranking of IR journals is heterogeneous
This is a guest post by Andreas Pacher who initiated the Observatory of International Relations (OOIR), a website which tracks Political Science and IR journals to continually list their latest...
Civilian Self-Protection: What Civilians Do in War When Help is Hard to Find
This is a guest post by Betcy Jose and Peace Media. Betcy Jose is Associate Professor at the University of Colorado Denver. She tweets @betcyj. Peace A. Medie is a Research Fellow in the Legon...
The Academic’s Dilemma: Being a Good Citizen and Managing Time
Tis the season for academic navel gazing so here are some things I've learned the hard way. This is primarily a piece for folks on the tenure track. I know that I come at this from a position of...
More Recent Posts
The tradeoffs of getting to graduate school in political science
This is the nerd equivalent of a dad joke. A pair of posts today from political scientists I admire prompts me to postpone my musings on the Hunger Games and to talk about how to get to graduate school in political science again instead. In an effort to convince you to read on, I'll name the...
Seoul 2012 Nuclear Security Summit
This week is the big nuclear security summit in Seoul, with something like 60 attending countries and over 40 heads of state or government. A friend from a Korean expat magazine here in town asked me for a brief write-up. Here are the issues as I see them from Korean IR and the local media. For...
Roseanne vs Kim: TV icons and the Republican ‘war on women’
Over the last few weeks it has been hard not to get overwhelmed by all the headlines related to the Republican primaries and women. There has been theRush Limbaugh fiasco, with Rush outdoing his usual dink-guisting self by calling law student Sarah Fluke a slut. This has been followed by...
It’s Time to De-Russianize the BRICS
With Putin’s ‘return’ to the presidency, Russia is now officially a joke as a serious great power state. True, Putin has been ridiculous for awhile, what with those shirtless photo-ops that came across like desperate, bizarre geopolitical ‘ads’ that Russia is still a superpower. But this is...
The US will not ‘Pivot’ much to Asia (3): We can’t afford it
Here are parts one and two, where I argued that there is no constituency in the US for the pivot, and that Asia is so culturally distant from the US, that Americans are unlikely to care enough to sustain the pivot. But we also don’t really need to pivot, nor do we have the money for it:3. The ME...
The ISA Drinking Game
The Duck crew getting ready for theirannual meet-up in 2011.We are now two weeks away from the start of the annual International Studies Association convention in sunny San Diego. In 2010 the Duck developed the APSA drinking game. Here is the ISA version for your conferencing pleasure. (Oh, and if...
The US will not ‘Pivot’ much to Asia (2): We don’t really care @ Asia
This is my Asian pivot.Here is part one, where I argued that there is no constituency in the US to support an Asian pivot besides the some businesspeople. 2. Connected to the first point is that Americans don’t know much about Asia. Of course, it’s true Americans don’t know a lot about the world...
Anger in America
Rush Limbaugh, the teaparty, OWS, all the way to the seven sisters -- a deeply misguided Smith College alumna, an open feud between Barnard and Columbia... and so it goes... Bobcat Goldthwait's new dark satire, God Bless America is supposed to be an hysterical look at the mixing of stupidity and...
International Women’s Day: Cupcakes and Hateraid
I did not make these to destroy feminism.Duck readers, I have a confession. I bake cupcakes. Thousands of them. I love doing it, I love icing them, I love decorating them and I really like eating them.This is not something that I would typically share with a blog on international politics....
The US will not ‘Pivot’ much to Asia (1): We don’t really Want to
I found this image here. So the US pivot toward Asia is all the rage in foreign policy now. Obama and Secretary Clinton genuinely seem to believe in this, and there good reasons for it. Briefly put, Asia has the money, people, and guns to dramatically impact world politics in a way that no other...
Invisible Children – Pretty Dang Visible
KONY, WE GON' FIND YOU - as soon as I buy my bracelet!Anyone who has been on Facebook and Twitter over the past 24 hours has probably seen impassioned pleas to watch a high-production video by Invisible Children, an American NGO (whose Board of Directors just happens to be entirely white American...
Here is something you can’t understand….
...How I could just kill a man!Obama said today, or at least I think it was today, that "we have Israel's back." So have we replaced the cowboy swagger bullshit with some urban swagger bullshit? Fo shizzle.In general, I object to any dumbing down of foreign policy, even in the public discourse,...