Climate change will exacerbate many of the political, social, and economic forces that generate conflict and insecurity – with enormous consequences for humanity.
6+1 Questions about States and Nature
read more
Recent Posts
Quack! Quack! Quack! A Call for New Guest Ducks
The fall semester is upon us, and with APSA in the rear view window, we’d like to bring on a new slate of guest Duck bloggers to continue to bring IR-related insights to bear on important real world...
Institutional transitions and the Paris Agreement’s rulebook
This is a guest post by Nicholas Chan, a lecturer at the School of Arts and Social Sciences, Monash University Malaysia. Follow him on Twitter at @nickdotchan Three years after the Paris Agreement...
Political Science Association Draws Ire for Honoring Condoleeza Rice
In the run-up to the American Political Science Association Conference in Boston this week, some political scientists are protesting the award of the Hubert Humphrey prize to former National...
More Recent Posts
Politics, Intelligence, and Academic Analysis
Writing in Foreign Policy, Paul Pillar makes the case that most so-called "intelligence failures" stem from bad leadership rather than problems with the US intelligence community. He touches upon a number of cases, but Iraq looms large:Had Bush read the intelligence community's report, he would...
Blondie
If you are running for the nomination of the Republican Party for President, there are a fewindispensables – you have to hate welfare recipients, oppose gay marriage, and have fired a gun at an animal at some point. (But apparently you no longer have to support a robust military presence overseas....
Pentagon as Economic Dynamo: Not
The Pentagon is remarkable for its ability to contrive reasons to justify its bloated budgets. In recent years, it and the gaggle of contractors, analysts, and journalists that support it have found military-security risks in everything from “hot zone" diseases to global warming. But with...
The DC Government’s Priorities
Last year I mentioned an editorial in the Washington Post decrying the District's decision--prodded by a small number of wealthy Georgetown residents--to force the University to meet unrealistic targets. A refresher:A recommendation by the city’s office of planning would require the university to...
Grand Strategy or Glossing Over Budget Cuts: Q&A
The twitter-verse, or at least, one of the corners I follow, had heaps of tweets dedicated to the rollout of the US defense review, with Obama playing a starring role. Apparently, Obama briefing at the Pentagon is a new thing. Anyhow, it raised all kinds of questions, so I thought I would...
The Peacenik Profession
Given some of the recent discussion on the Duck about the use of force in the Arabian Gulf, I thought I'd point out something interesting from the recent TRIP survey of international relations scholars. It turns out that between 60 and 90 percent of IR scholars surveyed simply reject the U.S. use...
Addendum: The Use of History in IR and the Causes of World War II
So, in my last post, I critiqued Rosasto and Schuessler's realist take on the causes of World War II, repeating the IR conventional wisdom of liberal internationalism (that it was reparations and beggar-thy-neighbor policies that worsened the Depression and created the conditions for the rise of...
Hu’s Culture War
Building on PM's earlier post, "Cultural Weapons and International Relations" I'd like to look at an example that helps to illustrate the ways in which Realism misunderstands the role of culture in global politics. In his blog post titled, "China's War Against Harry Potter," Stephen Walt analyzes...
Really Real: Take II on the Chicago IR Guys
In my last post, I offered a friendly critique of Nuno Monteiro's piece on how unipolarity has been less peaceful than other periods (debatable) and that U.S. power alone explains why minor states feel insecure and trigger conflicts with the unipole (same - the domestic politics of the U.S. and...
What does Mitt Romney’s victory in Iowa tell us about who the Republican nominee will be?
Unless... Nothing.Nothing at all.Four years ago, we knew neither Ron Paul nor Rick Santorum would be president.Six months ago, we knew neither Ron Paul nor Rick Santorum would be president.One month ago, we knew neither Ron Paul nor Rick Santorum would be president.Two days ago, we knew...
Cultural weapons and international relations
At The Monkey Cage, Erik Voeten notes the ascendancy of constructivism within International Relations (although "non-paradigmatic research" is an even more popular category).I suppose that's it for realism, then. So much for the null hypothesis that every article in IR published in the past 20...
Get Real! Chicago IR guys out in force
In light of the recent exchange on the Duck about Matthew Kroenig's work on Iran and policy-relevant research, I thought I'd flag a couple of articles from three University of Chicago alums from International Security (where Nuno Monteiro has a piece on unipolarity) and Perspectives on Politics...