This has been either a bad week for Israel, or a great week for Israel, depending on whom you ask or what your Twitter feed looks like. In the end, this may matter more for the relevance and impact of Middle East studies than anything else.
As a new mother of a baby boy I am enjoying a slightly different kind of golden shower than Donald Trump. So, between the 3 AM feeding and 4 AM diaper change I was scrolling through Twitter and...
This is a guest post from Clifford Bob, Professor and Chair of Political Science at Duquesne University. A free press is a major check on shoddy government policies and bad ideas, but if...
After nearly fifteen years of study, what do we know about the relationship between climate change and security? I recently attended a Woodrow Wilson Center event organized by the Peace Research...
John Bolton writes in the LA Times, which unlike the rest of the world I read because where else could I find out who died in my neighborhood recently, that we must stay in Afghanistan forever! Until the job gets done. I have no particularly informed opinion about this, which is kind of sad, but I...
Steve Walt has a challenge: ...who are the most amusing, entertaining, or witty writers in the field of international relations and foreign policy? I don't mean books or articles that are "funny" because they are wildly off-base; I mean scholars who are a joy to read because their prose is lively,...
As much as the proposal to put Mummar Gaddafi’s outfits up for display at the Costume Institute of New York should be true in a fully just world, I would imagine that it isn’t.Alas, the West shall be deprived of “four decades of Colonel Gaddafi’s superior dress sense”. And we are weaker for...
Dan Drezner has issued a call to arms!... or to your library card:"I therefore call upon the readers of this blog to proffer up their suggestions -- if you had to pick three books for an ambitious U.S. politician to read in order to bone up on foreign affairs, what would they be?"I have a gut...
Regarding the revelations in the latest diplo-document-dump, there are some good questions to be asked. Charli is wondering who actually did the leaking and Ben Wittes is concerned about the effect that this will have on not only the government, but the detainees themselves:Should it most upset...
I have the suspicion that my fan base might be the choir, and I want to be sure I play it down the middle. I am sure that Duck readers are the kind of folks who can laugh at themselves.European political scientists like post-positivism, also known as post-structuralism or post-modernism. Or at...
Unidentified ‘British security officials’ are telling journalists there is a possibility that sections of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) could attack next Friday’s royal wedding in London. At an event I attended this week, Patrick Mercer OBE, Conservative MP for Newark and member of the All-Party...
Nobody has come close to explaining how strategic narratives work in international relations, despite the term being banded about. Monroe Price wrote a great article in the Huffington Post yesterday that moves the debate forward. As I have already written, strategic narratives are state-led...
India appears to be continuing to shift its West Asia policy away from a once budding partnership with Iran, which aimed among other things to stabilize Afghanistan. It is rumored that in late March, the Indian National Security Adviser, Shiv Shanker Menon, delicately delivered a message to the...
The following word cloud from Crystal Smith's The Achilles Effect blog reflects the vocabulary commonly used for toy advertisements directed toward young boys (i.e. those toys in the 6-8 year old boy's section of the Toys 'R Us website were classified as "boys' toys"). While the data visualization...
Before I begin, I should thank those who have offered encouragement to continue the series and note, to those few who have not, that this is satire. Like all satire, it is an exaggeration of things that nevertheless have a kernel of truth. I myself am guilty of some of these things, like...
I am very, very ethnic.For those of you who weren’t following Canadian politics this week (I’m assuming that’s 98% of the Duck audience) the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC or “Tories”) took a lot of flack this week for calling up supporters and asking them to wear “ethnic” costumes. This is, of...