by Megan MacKenzie | 27 May 2016 | Academia
Oh man, I really didn't want to write about Angelina Jolie Pitt (AJP) and her damn LSE appointment. When I heard the news it just made me feel tired. But there has been an interesting/frustrating debate emerging and I just can't keep my yap shut- even on maternity leave. In his post on the topic, Dan Drezner asks us to all calm the F down; he assures us that policy schools have always been opportunistic and brought in pretty unqualified but...
by Steve Saideman | 25 May 2016 | Featured
I was on twitter talking with some folks about what Canada might promise at the Warsaw Summit, with the focus on who is going to provide the troops for the four battalions that will be based in the Baltics and Poland. The conversation went into a bunch of directions, so I had an epiphany while shopping--it is not about proximity or folks who have ties to the Baltics--it is about whose corpses would have the greatest international political...
by Josh Busby | 23 May 2016 | US Foreign Policy
With each passing week, Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, makes statements that challenge the basic operating assumptions of U.S. foreign policy, whether it be through his nonchalance about a trade war with China, repudiation of alliance commitments to NATO and Japan, or honoring the countries' debts. The question that emerges from this: does the American electorate care? While presidential candidates have to pass some semblance...
by Steve Saideman | 18 May 2016 | Academia, Featured
Yesterday, news quickly spread that the Social Science Research Network was bought by Elsevier. This quickly caused an uproar on twitter. Why? The SSRN was established to provide a place for social scientists to share their work in progress. Elsevier is one of the most rapacious rent-seeking profitable publishers of academic journals. Elsevier charges large amounts of money to universities so that universities can provide access to bundles...
by Annick T.R. Wibben | 16 May 2016 | Academia, Featured, Various and Sundry
Recently there has been a lot of talk about one of those issues academics (at least in the U.S.) obsess about: how to get tenure and the job security as well as license to (supposedly) speak truth to power that comes with it. This round of conversations started when Stephen Walt gave some, rather generic, advice in his Foreign Policy piece "How to Get Tenure". As a long-time professor at Harvard, Walt certainly has experience - but with a very...
by Steve Saideman | 13 May 2016 | Nerdblogging
Every time I think I am out, they pull me back in. No, not leading the mafia. Principal-agent theory. Yep, and I blame Stan Lee. How so? I saw the new Captain America: Civil Wars movie... explanation below the break: The entire movie is essentially about who guards the guardians (a title used more than once for civ-mil relations books)--who is the principal that oversees the agents? This is the classic question in civil-military...
by Steve Saideman | 13 May 2016 | Nerdblogging
It has been awhile, but with the end of the term, we are due for some Friday Nerd Blogging. How some definitive proof that adding a little bit of Empire makes ordinary dancing much better?
by Jeffrey Stacey | 12 May 2016 | Featured
Now that the U.S. presidential race has been whittled down effectively to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, and after Trump’s much anticipated foreign policy speech last week, we now have a Trump Doctrine, a new Clinton Doctrine—different from Bill Clinton’s pro humanitarian intervention doctrine—to contrast with the often misunderstood Obama Doctrine. As foreign policy has begun to feature more prominently in the race for the White House, we...
by Charli Carpenter | 10 May 2016 | Featured
This is a guest post by Janina Dill, Assistant Professor at the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics and a Research Fellow at the Center for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on international law and ethics in international relations, specifically in war. She is the author of “Legitimate Targets? Social Construction, International Law and US Bombing." “She...
by Dan Nexon | 6 May 2016 | Featured
For those of you not on Twitter. FWIW, Samuels' appears to be walking a very fine line in the piece. /1 — Daniel Nexon (@dhnexon) May 6, 2016 Here's his inference from the 'grand deception' of focusing on the 2013-2015 round & critics are seizing upon: 2/ pic.twitter.com/HZeUSEoggj — Daniel Nexon (@dhnexon) May 6, 2016 Here's the *only* supporting evidence he offers from Rhodes — which is not actually from the interview: 3/...
by Dan Nexon | 6 May 2016 | Featured
It seems that everyone (at least on the political right) is in a tizzy about the "revelations" in David Samuels' New York Times Magazine story on Ben Rhodes. For example, Lee Smith, at the Weekly Standard, headlines "Obama's Foreign Policy Guru Boasts of How the Administration Lied to Sell the Iran Deal." As I'll explain below, that's, at best, massive hyperbole. But what we really learned is that Ben Rhodes has a massive ego—Thomas Ricks is...
by Jon Western | 2 May 2016 | Academia
[Note: This is the second of two guest posts on life in the Liberal Arts Colleges from Sarah Stroup and Amy Yuen, both Associate Professors of Political Science, Middlebury College] According to the 2014 TRIP survey, at least one in six IR faculty in the United States teach at a liberal arts college.[1] If you want one of those jobs, how do you get it? In this second post (part I here), we identify a few steps, gathered based on our own...