In response to my discussion of his post "The Trouble with Dames in World Politics," Dan Drezner (among other things) challenges me to blog more, and to blog more about the issues directly related to Gender and IR - an encouragement so emphatic that it gets both bold and italic emphases.While I...

I am writing to introduce a new guest blogger to the Duck of Minerva. Jon Western is a Five College Associate Professor based at Mt. Holyoke College and has an extensive background in US foreign policy, including stints at the United States Institute of Peace and at the Department of State during...

The Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, a group of scholars and foreign affairs experts formed -- or at least solidified -- around the time of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, has issued an open letter to President Obama calling for a rethinking of US policy in Afghanistan. Below the fold...

A reporter for OpenDemocracy spent the month of August touring China, looking for signs of democratization. He finds more than he bargained for: Indeed, in interviewing people from various organisations and from very different perspectives, I was struck by a consistent undertone of worry about the...

Recently, I've been reading and mostly enjoying Fareed Zakaria's The Post-American World. It is a remarkable book, offering sweeping analysis of all sorts of global trends. Not just anyone could have tackled this project and it is definitely to Zakaria's credit that he has put together a...

I am overdue on a journal contribution I need to finish today (hopefully, the editors don't read this blog), but couldn't pass this one up ...Referencing an article in The Daily Telegraph called "Men Lose Their Minds When Speaking to Pretty Women," Dan Drezner writes a blog entry on Foreign...

I didn't get my local newspaper in Blacksburg, and usually use national sources (the New York Times and Wall Street Journal online, mostly) to get my news. Its been awhile, actually, since I've gotten a "local" newspaper (actually, I think, since the Pensacola News Journal where I grew up) and...

In a recent report, Garnter proposes that as corporations try to benefit from the growth of social media they will come to rely more and more on employees with formal, advanced training in the social sciences.Gartner Vice President Kathy Harris discusses in some detail four areas of jobs needed in...

OK, I'm officially back from hiatus after a long summer on the road plus the requisite settling-in period. Getting off the grid for a month and grounding one's experience in the practical aspects of life in a clunker with two kids gives one some perspective. I spent the summer aloof from some of...

I have been largely absent from the blogosphere over the last week or so, and will remain so for the next week or so, as my energy is split evenly between moving hassles and getting lost on campus at my new institutional home ... but I couldn't resist this one.I was just reading the Google News...

The Bush era is officially ancient history. I saw this commercial today:

The International Studies Compendium is a field-defining project of somewhat epic proportions. According to its architects, it "will be the most comprehensive reference work of its kind for the field of international studies" - a group of literally hundreds of 10,000 word, article-length,...