What are the answers?
6+1 Questions about From the Ashes of History: Collective Trauma and the Making of International Politics
read more
Recent Posts
Is faith-specific aid the best way to help Iraq’s Christians?
Vice President Pence recently pressured the US agency for international development (USAID) to appoint a special liaison to Iraqi Christians. This may not capture the same headlines as the Kavanaugh...
Welcome New Ducks
The school year is off to a great start, and we wanted to thank our previous slate of guest Ducks and welcome some new guests. Thanks to all of our guests from last year. Lisa Gaufman and Dillon...
What’s in a Name? Developing Countries and Security Cooperation
This post comes from Dr. Fabiana Sofia Perera, Assistant Research Fellow at the William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies and a 2016 alumna of Bridging the Gap's New Era Workshop....
More Recent Posts
Robots and Prejudice
At ThinkProgress Alyssa Rosenberg shares a lovely new short film about robots and prejudice:No Robots from YungHan Chang on Vimeo.Rosenberg draws a distinction between the representations of robots in this film and the scarier representations in much popular culture:Often, when we see robots in...
Bad Predator?
Peter Singer has an op-ed in the Times which carefully makes the case against drones by carefully putting forth the proposition that their use undermines democracy: What troubles me, though, is how a new technology is short-circuiting the decision-making process for what used to be the most...
The ICC and Kenya: In the Thick of Deterrence
Antony Njuguna / NairobiThe big news out of the ICC today was the confirmation of charges against four of the "Ocampo Six" Kenyan elites accused of orchestrating and inciting the country's post-election violence in 2007-2008. Ruto, Arap Sang, Muthaura and Kenyatta had their charges confirmed and...
Power Shift in Global Economic Governance
Has the worm finally turned? Reuters today featured a story on the emerging market economies' push-back against the status quo of Western-dominated global economic governance. The piece features an explicit demand (and overt exercise of financial leverage) for a power shift in the predominant...
Urination Distraction
Over the past few weeks we’ve had to endure military brass and top government officials falling over themselves to condemn American GIs – first for urinating on dead Afghans, and more recently for beating a sheep. Earlier in the Iraq and Afghan wars, we’ve suffered through pious denunciations of...
Happy Year of the Dragon
I apologize to Duck readers for being such a slacker this past semester. Some things on the home/work front have had me tied down a bit, and the truth is I won't be fully back in the saddle until after this manuscript is done. But. In the words of George R. R. Martin, fire cannot kill a dragon,...
House MD Epistemologist
Like many of my nerdy friends, I am eagerly awaiting the return of the second half of this season's "House MD." But let's be honest, the show basically substitutes a flow chart for a plot. No one with half a brain actually watches the show for the "medical mystery"; after all the show is premised...
What I Learned Teaching IR in Asia (1): Learning to Love US Hegemony
<img alt="" galleryimg="no" onload="var downlevelDiv = document.getElementById('e6403e01-e0de-49ce-a231-02a0ef2f117a'); downlevelDiv.innerHTML = "";"...
Duck Stuff: In with the Old, in with the New
We are pleased to announce roster changes at the Duck. Patrick Porter and Brian Rathbun have agreed to become permanent contributors. Quacktacular!And today we want to introduce a new guest blogger - Robert Kelly. Bob teaches IR at Pusan National University in Korea and writes a lot on East Asian...
Damn Yankees!
Wow. South Carolina took a cane to the "Mormon Massachusetts Moderate" last night. This moves Nate Silver to write a longish post comparing the conventional wisdom (now embodied by my colleague, Hans Noel, and his co-authors) with the "This time it's different" crowd, in which Silver makes not a...
$h•! PTJ Says #3: protest banners vs. precise terms
I am going to try writing down pieces of advice that I give to students all the time, in the hopes that they might be useful for people who can't make it to my office hours."Many if not most of the terms we use to differentiate styles and traditions of scholarly inquiry are tools for positioning...
Friday Anti-Nerd Blogging: The Appeal of Downton Abbey
People are going mad about Downton Abbey. The Rolling Stone calls it "crack for Anglophiles." The demand was enough to create a second "season," and is even giving PBS the notion that it might begin to draw in some of the types who watch Showtime and HBO series, maybe even Game of Thrones fans. I...