Scholars of international relations don’t agree on much, but they at least agree that anarchy (th…
Episode 25: The New Hierarchy Studies
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Recent Posts
Academic Smothering. Part II.
To illustrate this post, I would love to put that cute stock photo of a woman dressed in a taupe formal suit holding an adorable baby in a diaper, but it is just wildly unrealistic. For starters,...
Inertia is the strongest force in international relations
Details continue to trickle out about the horrific assassination of Saudi dissident and writer Jamal Khashoggi. This has captured the attention of foreign policy experts, who have questioned the...
Blogger’s Block: The History of the End?
I have had trouble blogging this past year. It's a challenge to think about academically informed observations on contemporary global politics when the world is in some places literally on fire and...
More Recent Posts
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...
Why N Korea Gets Away with its Stunts: a Response to Jennifer Lind
Jennifer Lind has a good piece up on Foreign Affairs this week on why NK seems to regularly get away with with hijinks like last week’s rocket test (which directly contravenes UN Resolution 1874). She notes, correctly, that NK has been pulling unanswered, wild stunts like this for years –...
Winecoff vs. Nexon Cage Match!
Kindred Winecoff has a pretty sweet rebuttal to my ill-tempered rant of late March. A lot of it makes sense, and I appreciate reading graduate student's perspective on things. Some of his post amounts to a reiteration of my points: (over)professionalization is a rational response to market...
All Politics is Local, Korean style
<img src="https://lh3.ggpht.com/-lXf905vas9I/T4Zfu5yVCwI/AAAAAAAAAJg/Cgr7ZRk41Cg/videoefa933ead93d%25255B3%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" style="border-style: none" galleryimg="no" onload="var downlevelDiv =...
Kim Jong Un’s Ascent (2): Rocket Launch as a Sign of a Power Struggle?
Here is part one, where I argued that Kim’s rise scrambles our conventional wisdom on NK, opening a lot of unexpected room, at least early in his tenure, to try to deal. The cold war stand-off in Korea is now so bad, that there is little to lose in trying to talk with him, and it would seem like a...
Belated Friday Nerd Blogging.
Though my ISA experience was indeed interrupted both by an ultimate game and a nasty case of the flu, rumors of my disappearance have been wildly exaggerated. A travel-intensive Friday day plus a kid-intensive Saturday are all that have impeded timely nerd blogging this week. It won't happen often.
Kim Jong Un’s Ascent (1): A Unique Negotiating Opportunity
Or maybe not…The following short piece for the Korean National Defense University was written after the Leap Day Deal, but before the rocket launch announcement. In the interim, the US has decided to cancel the leap day deal, which is entirely understandable, but a mistake nonetheless I think....