Over the past month, U.S. President Donald Trump has shifted from misogynistic jabs to full‑scale performances of militarized authority, an evolution entirely consistent his political...
Things have been rough for Canada. It's engulfed in political turmoil, as Justin Trudeau steps down from leadership and the country braces for a contentious election. Incoming US President Donald...
US President Jimmy Carter's funeral is being held today in Washington, DC at the National Cathedral. Since he passed away shortly after Christmas, tributes have abounded about a man once derided as...
Amid the annual deluge of end-of-year lists, I started to think about what readings generated the best classroom discussions I have overseen in the past calendar year. That list of readings is...
Whenever we talk about the liberal international order, we actually also talk about globalization. The former promoted international trade and financial liberalization , the spread of democracies, and the growth of global governance. These, in turn, promoted interdependence. Markers of global...
This is part II of the first instalment of a new series of interviews on Duck of Minerva entitled Quack-and-Forths.
Happy belated New Year! After a rather chaotic December – and lots of work on the backend of this site – we're getting ready to kickstart happenings here at the Duck. We've got a few posts and a symposium – all of which really should've been posted a while back – coming soon. You may already have...
This is the first instalment of a new series of interviews on Duck of Minerva entitled Quack-and-Forths.
ymena Kurowska of Central European University joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast. Professor Kurowska grew up in the northern part of Poland, at a time of world and local transition. She discusses what it was like to move around to 'closed' cities in a military family, having a...
One year ago today, a pro-Trump crowd attempted to shut down the certification of Joe Biden's electoral victory. America is still making sense of it. We're debating how it could have been prevented, whether it can happen again, how to prevent it happening again. But there's also a foundational...
that I actually conceived of the idea for this post last week but was only able to force myself to write it today by promising myself a variety of self-care rewards like naps and whiskey.
I read a lot of crap this year, but the good stuff was really good. The Causes of World War Three, by C. Wright Mills This book is from 1961, just after Mills's famous "Letter to the New Left" and just before the Cuban Missile Crisis. The book basically predicts the Cuban Missile Crisis down to...
Joe Biden's "Summit for Democracy" was held last week. This summit meant to bring together the world's democracies, strengthening them and pro-democratic global norms. The hope is that this would reverse the growing trend of authoritarianism around the world. Some were hopeful. In his opening...
The Biden administration just issued the government’s first ever anti-corruption strategy. The upshot: It’s needed. It’s analytically informed. It raises the prioritization of fighting kleptocracy. The downside: It’s not all that realistic. It defines corruption so widely...
The practice of maintaining a long-term, peacetime military presence in another state (or “sovereign basing”) only developed in the last century. Before World War II, a foreign military presence usually meant one of three things: occupation, colonization, or a wartime alliance. This changed radically in the years after 1945.
As many of our readers have likely already heard, Robert Jervis died yesterday. The field has lost a gentle intellectual giant. Unlike many of my friends from Columbia, Bob wasn't on my dissertation committee; I only took one course from him. But I'll remember him as both brilliant and very...