And in despair I bowed my head; "There is no peace on earth," I said;"For hate is strong, And mocks the song Of peace on earth, good-will to men! Thanks for reading The Duck of Minerva! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow My family and I go to our church’s Christmas morning service, in addition to the Christmas eve service. It’s a short service, with light attendance, but it helps to remind...
I started this post sort of confessionally. It's been a while since I wrote on the blog. I had started one earlier this year on the destruction of USAID and PEPFAR but redirected my energy into advocacy (such as it was). One reason for my relative absence on the blog is government service. From 2021 to 2023, I was in the Biden Administration serving as a Senior Climate Advisor in the Department of Defense. More recently, my father was in ill...
The Hayseed Scholar podcast has come to a close. In this farewell episode, Brent's brother Kyle hosts it and they chat about the podcast and why Brent is closing it down. Two friends of the pod, Matt McDonald and Jelena Subotic, also join to mention what they liked and what they (Jelena) did not like about the podcast. Brent closes by asking Kyle, who is a LinkedIn rockstar, about the changing landscape of social media and reaching beyond...
Probably not, but the problem isn't impartiality it's the politics of impartiality On November 9th, the director general of The BBC, Tim Davie, along with the head of news, Deborah Turness, resigned. Their resignation was in response to a report published in the British newspaper, The Telegraph, that claimed a BBC News programme, Panorama, edited a speech by President Donald Trump to make it appear as though he encouraged the Capital...
The U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean is confusing the MAGA faithful. With rumors swirling of an imminent operation to topple Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, the president’s supporters are asking what happened to “America First”? Tucker Carlson recently remarked it was a “little strange” that the U.S. was telling another country, “we don’t like your leadership — leave or we’ll kill you.” Trump’s former chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon,...
Melissa Willard-Foster is an associate professor of political science at the University of Vermont. Her research interests center broadly on international conflict and U.S. foreign policy. She is especially interested in how domestic political pressures cause policymakers to pursue strategies that lead them into costly conflicts. She is the author of Toppling Foreign Governments (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019) which surveys 133 cases...
On November 1, 2025, President Donald Trump threatened to end all U.S. assistance to Nigeria and — if he deemed it necessary — launch a military attack against insurgents in the country. As National Public Radio reported: “If the Nigerian Government continues to allow the killing of Christians, the U.S.A. will immediately stop all aid and assistance to Nigeria, and may very well go into that now disgraced country, ‘guns-a-blazing,’ to...
I’ve been thinking a lot about the meaning of “responsibility,” specifically in the context of politics and governance. We live in an age of populism, rising authoritarianism, disinformation, climate change, and the slaughter of civilians in places like Gaza and Sudan. The notions of responsibility associated with the so-called “liberal international order” are all under strain. Most of us, I think, rely on a kind of “duck test.” That is, we...
Kodili Henry Chukwuma is an Assistant Professor of International Security. Kodili's PhD was awarded by the University of East Anglia in 2022, following which he joined the School of Government and International Affairs in Durham University. Kodili's research focuses on the politics of security, terrorism and counter-terrorism. Kodili's research also has a regional focus on Africa, as well as interests in (the politics of) time and space of...
I had high hopes for director Kathryn Bigelow’s House of Dynamite, a new Netflix movie about U.S. nuclear command and control. There’s so much potential for cinema to unpack the dilemmas and tragedies of living under a nuclear sword of Damocles, and my initial reaction was disappointment at the ways this fails to be that movie. But for all its shortcomings, the film also serves as a sobering reminder of the profound peril nuclear weapons...
Philipp C. Bleek is professor in the Nonproliferation and Terrorism Studies program , and a fellow at both the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies and Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism, at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. He works on the causes, consequences, and amelioration of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons threats, from both state and non-state actors, at the...
What is the name of the journal article (or book) and what are its coordinates? Miray Philips. 2025. “The Social Construction of Christian Persecution through Quantification in International Religious Freedom Advocacy.” Sociology of Religion. https://doi.org/10.1093/socrel/sraf022 2. What’s the argument? In Washington, DC, International Religious Freedom advocates mostly rely on data by the Pew Research Center on religious restrictions and Open...