The following is a guest post by Jeff Colgan, Richard Holbrooke Assistant Professor at Brown University, and is @JeffDColgan on Twitter. It’s that time of year again, when professors are designing syllabi as fast as they can with deliberation and care. Recently I analyzed IR syllabi for PhD students. The data suggest a gender bias that instructors could easily correct. The case that gender diversity is good for IR and political science has been...
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APSA Tweet Up: Ducks Like Beer
Once again, those poli sci types on twitter (Marc Lynch, Dan Drezner, me, and the other usual suspects) will be meeting up at the APSA on Friday, August 4th from 5:30-7pm at the Parc 55 hotel bar (which I believe is on the second floor) which is across the street from the Hilton. Note that the regular Hilton is undergoing renovation so the usual bar/lobby meeting arrangements will not work this time around.
#BringBackOurGirls, Feminist Solidarity & Intervention – Part Two
My first post on the Duck focused on the emergence of the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag and campaign, pointing also to the ease with which hashtags can get appropriated and campaigns derailed. Yesterday, #BringBackOurGirls Nigeria (@BBOG_Nigeria on twitter) started a one week campaign to mark 500 days since the abduction. Given the continuation of the campaign, in today's post I want to dig a bit deeper in examining the urge to do "something": Why...
So You Would Like a Job at a Policy School
So, in another installment on the job market front, I thought I'd weigh in with some thoughts on possible differences of job postings and hiring processes at policy schools. Admittedly, this is an idiosyncratic take having just worked at one of them, but I think there may be some generalizable aspects from my own experience. I have also passed through two others as a post-doc. If my institution is any indication, policy schools tend to be...
The Future of Deterrence?
A long, long time ago, before I became a professor and even before I went to graduate school for my doctorate, I worked for a few years in the defense community. I was a Defense Analyst for the Strategic Assessment Center of Science Applications International Corporation (unfortunately, the SAC no longer exists), which was a small organization that dealt with issues of future war. We did much of our work for the Office of Net Assessment of the...
Challenges to Academic Freedom Above the Wall
Why Worry About Online Media and Academic Freedom? Um, because academic administrations have lousy instincts? I have gotten involved in this whole online media intersecting with academic freedom mostly by accident--the ISA mess last year. I am not an expert on academic freedom, nor am I an expert on the use of online media. So, I could imagine a university representative being upset at me as an employee trashing their academic...
Opting for Trials Post-Conflict? Why the Structure of Losers Matters
This post was written with Lindsay Heger, who is Associate Director, One Earth Future Foundation. We’ve seen the rise of judicial means to bring human rights violators to trial in recent decades, both regionally and globally. Most famously, the International Criminal Court, was established after the Rome Treaty was ratified in 2002 in order to bring the most egregious state violators of human rights to to account for crimes of genocide, crimes...
Living IR: Lessons from Manuela Picq’s arrest and detention
Over the weekend news came from Ecuador that Dr Manuela Picq of Universidad San Francisco de Quito, had been beaten and arrested while participating in a legal protest over indigenous rights as a journalist. Initially hospitalised as a result of injuries sustained at the hands of police, she was informed that her visa had been cancelled due to her having engaged in “political activity” and that she would be deported from Ecuador, where she...
Convincing Waverers to Support the Iran Deal
When the Iran Deal was announced and supported by the P5 of the UN Security Council, I would have thought that the tide of elite opinion among US lawmakers would break in support of the Deal, possibly including some Republicans (maybe Jeff Flake?), possibly enough to filibuster a no vote in the Senate. Now, it comes down to whether President Obama has the votes in either the House or Senate to forestall a veto override of what will certainly...
One Size Fits Few
With all of the recent essays on the Duck this summer about the job market, citation indexes, and lack of confidence, there seems to be a brewing undercurrent about the anxiety of another academic year. Some of us maybe facing down a PhD defense and the job market for the first time, some of us compiling our pre-tenure review files, and some of us just generally feeling uneasy about a new area of research or a class we’ve never taught. Some...
Affective or Effective? War Child’s Gamefication of Conflict Experience
Gamification is "is the application of game elements and digital game design techniques to non-game problems, such as business and social impact challenges", to borrow the course description from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania's Gamification MOOC. The approach has been used to try and improve employee productivity, facilitate risk prevention education (and indeed many other forms of education) , resolve social conflict,...
The collateral damage of performance metrics
This is a guest post from Daniel Mügge who is an associate professor of political science at the University of Amsterdam and the lead editor of the Review of International Political Economy. In two recent posts, Cullen Hendrix, and Daniel Nexon and Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, have tabled important pros and cons of Google Scholar (GS) as a base for measuring of academic performance. And the flurry of reactions to their blogs reveal just how...