Coup d’états are less likely to succeed against rulers who “counterbalance” their militaries with presidential guards, militarized police, and other security forces outside of military command. But there may be downsides.
This is the third in a series of posts about bridging the gap between policy and academia. The first focused on principles for engagement. The second on short-form writing, including blogging. ...
This is part II of a series on bridging the gap between policy and academia. In my last post, I laid out some principles for thinking policy engagement as an academic. In this post, I'll talk about...
Just returning from an invigorating #ISA2017 where I was inspired by colleagues and new ideas and processing all the stimulating interactions and conversations I had. Last night at the fabulous...
As I've discussed before, the current incarnation of "al-Qaeda" appears - at least based upon public documents - to be more of a diverse movement than a single organization. Indeed, "al-Qaeda" is, in some respects, linked together by the claims of particular groups to represent "al-Qaeda" and by...
Writing in Slate, William Saletan argues that Al-Queda's strategy is to "destroy democracy from within."Bin Laden's whole game plan is to turn the people of the democratic world against their governments. He thinks democracies are weak because their people, who are more easily frightened than...
Can someone give me a good reason why Michael Totten's latest essay is any better than his first published piece? Because, for the life of me, I can't understand what the point of the thing is.Totten argues that Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon is a good precedent for a future US withdrawal from...
Like Rodger, I've been reluctant to write anything substantive about the London bombings until we have better information about precisely what happened, and who was involved. Nevertheless, I think some conditional comments are probably in order.For those of you who haven't seen it, John Ikenberry...
The academic wing of the blogsphere has seen a fair amount of angst, anger, and hand-wringing over the article in the Chronicle for Higher Education, "Bloggers Need not Apply". The anonymous rant, written under the pseudonym "Ivan Tribble" (ah, the irony!), is chock full of stupidiousness...
Prisons are schools of crime. Put a lot of socially deviant people together and they teach each other new tricks. Social scientists studying prisons have been making this argument for decades. I state this from memory: the high school debate topic in 1976-77 (the year I began debating) was on...
While we're all digesting the barbaric bombings in London, and waiting for more information on which to base analysis, I thought I'd share one of the stranger spam emails I've received lately.dhn2，您好！ Honorable American friends,How do you do?I am a Chinese students of Moslem people university .I...
Patrick Jackson and Peter Mandaville co-authored a terrific chapter for Iver Neumann's and my edited book on "Harry Potter and International Relations."Okay, you can stop laughing at us now. We all had fun writing the volume and it does, actually, have some academic merit.Anyway, the point I was...
I've already made myself look stupid once today, so I figure: why not have another go?When I was a PhD student at Columbia, I taught in the Contemporary Civilization program. Teaching in CC was, without a doubt, the best experience of my educational career. Not only was it just generally a good...
From Political Wire:Many Democratic fans of the Washington Nationals are buying baseball capswith an alternate "DC" logo instead of the more common cursive "W" because it reminds them of the current occupant of the White House, according to the Washington Post."During the design process, a...
Brad DeLong has an interesting post on "Wilhelmine China". In a recent Wall Street Journal Greg Ip editorial Ip and Neil King, Jr. take issue with Brad's analogy between the UK and the US in the nineteenth century. Brad quotes them:Brad DeLong, an economic historian at the University of California...
John Hawkins' interview with Mark Steyn recently made the rounds at conservative and right-leaning international-relations blogs. Since I spent part of last year involved in an edited book project on religion and Europe, I thought it might be interesting to look closely at Steyn's arguments. The...