Is Constructivism best understood as a scholarly disposition, a body of theory, or an intellectua…
Episode 21: Constructivists All the Way Down
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Recent Posts
Us Too
We knew it was coming and here it is. An open source spreadsheet designed by The Professor Is In blog's Karen L. Kelsky for the purpose of collecting up stories of sexual harassment, abuse, and...
President Trump, You’re No George Carlin
The Trump Administration has decided it’s finally time for it to whip out its best George Carlin impression. It’s announced its own list of seven words you can never say—at least not if you are...
Nothing Compares to You
For Russia watchers Christmas always comes early (or Hanukkah comes right on time!) when Putin gives his annual presser in mid-December to the journalists from Russia and around the world. This year...
More Recent Posts
Anti-Iran Protests in Afghanistan
In 1991, with the Soviet Union on the verge of collapse, the rump regime of Mohammad Najibullah finally cut a deal with Iran. The Iranians were allowed to supply the Hazarajat in central Afghanistan with armaments and other goods through direct flights to Bamiyan in exchange for supplying...
The mean world…or why we should all tone it down.
The conversation on last week's tragedy in Tucson has gone from the absurd to the absurd to the absurd. The late George Gerbner who was the long-time Dean of the Annenberg School of Communication at UPenn and who later finished his career at Temple University was a pioneer in the study of media...
Afghan Views on the India-Pakistan Proxy Fight
The visit of the Indian External Affairs Minister, S.M. Krishna, to Afghanistan a few days ago overlapped the Afghan High Peace Council's visit to Pakistan to establish a joint Afghanistan-Pakistan Peace Jirga. Although the overlap of the two events appears to be coincidental, it highlighted the...
Anonymous attacks Tunisian Government Websites
The Christian Science Monitor is reporting that the hackitivist collective [?] "Anonymous," famous for DDOS attacks on Mastercard and Paypal after the Wikileaks Cablegate fiasco, is attacking the government of Tunisia's website in support of the growing and increasingly violent protests there:"But...
Guns and Bombs!
Robert Farley has written a veritably excellent post on the need for liberals (er, "progressives") to get serious about defense policy.I only wish to add that it is time for international-relations scholars to re-engage with defense policy and "hard" security questions. We're going through a...
Because we needed another illustration of the absurdity of thinking about academia in economic terms
Courtesy of our friends at The Economist:PhD graduates do at least earn more than those with a bachelor’s degree. A study in the Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management by Bernard Casey shows that British men with a bachelor’s degree earn 14% more than those who could have gone to...
Imperial Anxieties
Continuing the Duck series on highly improbable dystopian scenarios, here is an advertisement for the not yet released video game, "Homefront." The story is set in 2027 when a united Korea under the rule of North Korea's Kim Jong Un invades a severely weakened United States.Cold War buffs will...
Fun with Ngrams
If you're a nerdy professor trying to avoid grading, like I am, you might want to play around with Google Lab's new Ngram feature. The feature allows you to see how often a particular word or phrase has appeared within a large number of books over time. For examples, here is a chart comparing...
7/7 five years on: Conflicting memories make an official record difficult
Aldgate station plan, London undergroundA month into the official inquest into the ‘7/7’ London bombings of July 2005, it is clear that the governmental imperative to arrive at a clear, authoritative and final account of what happened on the day might prove impossible because of the unreliability...
In political economy, politics comes first
Recent developments in Europe, and especially the ongoing meltdown in Ireland, should force political economists to reevaluate how well their theories can explain the perpetuation of current international regimes. The past twenty years of IPE theorizing has been exceptionally exciting and...
The Wikileaks Rap
In keeping with the Duck tradition of reducing IR issues to rap videos...(It is worth sticking around until 4:55 for the cameo...)From The Juicemedia and Mother Jones
Why Wikileaks Matters
The initial release of a mere 291 out of 251,287 diplomatic cables has generated a predictable buzz on the blogosphere and established media outlets. Pundits have quickly maneuvered into standard structural roles in relation to the content of the leaked documents: the ho-hum...