I would like to cut through a lot of the rhetoric and discuss where we are with the Greece crisis and where we are likely to be quite soon. I will conclude with some thoughts as to why this has been an enormous failure on the part of Syriza and the intellectual left that has supported it, and it will come with a very high cost. TL;DR: Wishful thinking is no substitute for real analysis. The European North made its position on indefinite...
For the past two years, Jon Monten, Jordan Tama, and I have been working with the survey team at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs (Dina Smeltz and Craig Kafura) to revive the leader surveys that the Council used to run alongside their foreign policy opinion surveys of the American public. Because of the expense and the difficulties of getting responses, the Council discontinued those surveys in 2004, leaving academics with really limited...
After you have seen the fall foliage at ISS-ISAC, why not see beautiful St. Louis, MO in November? ISA-Midwest - my FAVORITE conference - is November 19th - 22nd. Deadline for submissions is July 1st. This is a great conference for those interested in foreign policy or human rights themes. It's also a very inviting conference for junior scholars with lots of professional development opportunities. Hope to see you there - I'll join you for...
Charli and I, along with a few other colleagues here in the Five Colleges are hosting this year's joint annual conference of the International Security Studies Section and International Security and Arms Control Section of ISA and APSA. The conference will be held Oct. 8 - 10 -- fall break weekend and peak fall foliage in New England! The conference theme is Global Trends in War and Political Violence. Over the past century, we have witnessed...
I have yet to weigh in on the recent hack on the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). Mostly this is due to two reasons. First is the obvious one for an academic: it is summer! But the second, well, that is due to the fact that as most cyber events go, this one continues to unfold. When we learned of the OPM hack earlier this month, the initial figures were 4 million records. That is, 4 million present and former government employees’...
Last week, this duck crossed the pond to attend the British International Studies Association (BISA) NGO Working Group workshop on Non-governmental Organizations (NGOs) in Global Governance. The workshop convened scholars of NGOs as well as NGO practitioners to consider the practice and changing landscape of global governance as well as the role of NGOs therein. A highlight was an interactive session during which we discussed the recent...
As a professor of international relations, I often have to radically adjust my syllabi from semester to semester. International politics changes so frequently that last year's hot button issue is often no longer relevant the next time I teach a class. I offer my course on Terrorism every other year and it's on the agenda for this coming fall. The last time I taught this class was Spring 2014. ISIS had just emerged on to the scene (the closest...
The following is a guest post by Jeffrey C. Isaac, the James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, Bloomington. What constitutes important political science research? This question has been much discussed lately in connection with “When Contact Changes Minds: An Experiment on Transmission of Support for Gay Equality,” an article by Michael J. LaCour and Donald P. Green published in Science magazine. The reason...
President Obama's difficulty in convincing Congress to grant him authority to negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership without legislative amendment is a serious setback for his foreign policy agenda. Most commentary on the subject has focused on the trade deal's likely economic impact -- which are not negligible, most importantly for Asian partners like Vietnam, but likely won't impact the US in discernable ways. Others discuss its geopolitical...
Hello there! I'm very excited to be blogging here at Duck of Minerva for the next several months, and I'd like to thank all the full-time Ducks for the opportunity! For my first post, I thought I'd address something I've been thinking about ever since a student asked about it in my US Foreign Policy class this past semester. She asked about the BDS movement and whether I thought it had any chance of influencing Israel's behavior towards the...
This is a guest post submitted by Chris Barker, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Southwestern College For the past three weeks, “Political Science Rumors” (PSR) has been on fire over a falsified data scandal involving Michael LaCour’s research showing that the presence of a gay canvasser changes how respondents report feeling about gays. The scandal has achieved national prominence, with stories running in the New York Mag, NPR, the...
After much anticipation, nail-biting anxiety, rumors and speculation, we are finally able to announce our new team of guest bloggers!! Below are the eight amazing minds you will see posting regularly over the next six months.* Please make them feel welcome!! Seth Weinberger is an Associate Professor in the Department of Politics & Government at the University of Puget Sound, where he teaches courses on global security, foreign policy,...