The Chronicle reports on a rather old problem in the electronic peer-review process: editors, authors, and reviewers forwarding Word documents without scrubbing the properties, tracked changes, and other sources of embedded data likely to reveal a writer's or reviewer's identity. Henry Farrell...

During the late 1980s and the 1990s academic international relations was dominated by the so-called "paradigm wars." Scholars argued over -- and oriented their writings towards -- the major three "isms": realism, liberalism, and constructivism.[1]The degree to which arguments about the "isms"...

The role of insults -- and the corrolary role of honor -- in world politics represents an odd topic in international-relations scholarship. Everyone knows insults and honor matter a great deal. Some scholars write about them -- or, at least, related topics like "prestige" -- but no one seems to be...

I've been catching up on the Daily Show recently. One recent episode featured Michael Mandelbaum plugging his new book, The Case For Goliath: How America Acts As The World's Government in the Twenty-first Century. Best line of the interview? John Stewart's statement that American hegemony involves...

One of my former graduate students, Igor Danchenko, is in the news for uncovering Vladimir Putin's plagiarized dissertation. This is from the Chronicle of Higher Education, March 26: Two scholars at a research institution in Washington have accused Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, of...

Nidal al-Mughrabi of Reuters writes:Hamas called on Monday for talks with Western powers to seek a "just peace" in the Middle East but showed no sign of softening its stance on Israel as it presented its government to the Palestinian parliament.Hamas's prime minister-designate, Ismail Haniyeh,...

Georgetown overcomes my temporary defection to Ohio State University and emerges triumphant in a lopsided victory. Clearly, the basketball team did not, much to my dismay, miss my tremendous personal contribution to their efforts.Filed as: Georgetown, Hoyas, and march madness

Marc Schulman wants his regular readers to publicize one of his recent posts, in which he reflects on French philosopher André Glucksmann's recent article in Democratiya, "Separating Truth and Belief." It is an interesting read. Marc emphasizes a particular passage:Civilised discourse analyses and...

Two polls on the motion to censure Bush show very different results. Yesterday an ARG poll found Americans favor censure for the President by a 46-44% margin, i.e., a statistical tie. Today, Rasmussen found Americans oppose censure by 38-45%. Seems like a big swing for a single day, eh? Perhaps...

If Barry Bonds had never taken steroids, never broken the single-season HR record, and never moved himself into baseball's holy trinity of HR hitters (i.e. Aaron, Ruth, and Mays), he still would have been a first-ballot Hall of Famer. In addition to his 8 gold gloves and 3 MVPs (pre-juice) he...

The new 2006 National Security Strategy is out. Bill has been anticipating this since early January. CSM has a March 17 story ...with some remarks by John Mearsheimer."It's not an especially hawkish document," says Professor Mearsheimer. "It makes arguments about using force that most security...

Over at Donklephont, Michael Reynolds tackles foreign policy through his lens of self-proclaimed centrism. In doing so, he makes some important errors. The first, and less obvious, is that he conflates broader approaches to foreign policy with specific ideological positions within the American...