Waking up the other day to discover that I was a duck was a rather disconcerting experience. They say the condition is only temporary, but there is a danger that I will forever be seen as a bit of a quack. Nevertheless, the opportunity to blog at the Duck of Minerva is a great privilege and a great honour… and I am nervous as hell! I have spent much of my time over the past few weeks trying to digest the United Nations report on Operation...
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Sexism in Political Science, part II: The Very Least One Can Do
Last night, I posted this about sexism in political science. It has gotten a pretty strong response getting 10x as many hits (so far) as my usual post, lots of retweets by female political scientists, and some sharing on facebook. The sharing on facebook came with props as my female political science friends were happy to see a senior male political scientist talk bluntly about this. These props/kudos made me feel squishy because it is not...
You Are Doing It Wrong
The former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis (also a former colleague) has compared Greece's situation to "fiscal waterboarding" at the hands of its creditors. Thomas Piketty has accused Germany of forgetting its own post-World War II experience with debt relief. When I read some of the appeals to Germany and the European Union on Greece's debt situation, I thought as an act of strategic framing that Greece/Syriza (and to a lesser extent...
Civil(ian) Military Integration & The Coming Problem for International Law
In late May, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) released a white paper on China’s Military Strategy. This public release is the first of its kind, and it has received relatively little attention in the broader media. While much of the strategy is of no big surprise (broad and sweeping claims to reunification of Taiwan with mainland China, China’s rights to territorial integrity, self-defense of “China’s reefs and islands,” a nod to...
Sexism in Political Science
There is a discussion on PSR about sexism in political science, with most folks concurring that it is still an issue with some deniers pointing out that support groups for women are exclusive, too. Um, yeah. How to address such discussions? I go to my standard operating procedure: what have I seen over the years? The answer: a heap of sexism which has not gone away. First, there is the repeated myth that jobs are gamed for women and...
Why Piketty Is Wrong about Debt Forgiveness
[UPDATE: This provides more detail and context than I do. Read it instead of, or at least in addition to, my post.] Thomas Piketty has decided that because Germany was the beneficiary of debt relief in 1953 that they should extend the same privilege to Greece today: When I hear the Germans say that they maintain a very moral stance about debt and strongly believe that debts must be repaid, then I think: What a huge joke! Germany is the country...
An American in Canada – Thoughts on Going Abroad for a Job
I never thought that when I started grad school I’d be relocating to another country. Then again, when I got the job in Canada, it did not really occur to me that I was “really” leaving the US – on my previous visits to Toronto, everything felt pretty familiar. Plus, as a scholar of transnational activism, borders were supposed to be made increasingly irrelevant. I still remember the moment the border agent stamped my passport and glued the...
Greece: a Shakespearean Tragedy
In the Greek bailout episode the Greek government has been behaving much like the self-pitying Antonio from “The Merchant of Venice,” while the EU has been posing as a rather heavy-handed Shylock. Despite being aware of the damaging consequences of a Greek default and potential exit from the Eurozone, the EU seems intent of having its pound of flesh. By subjecting Greece to additional austerity provisions, it may be risking the revival of the...
Organizing Collaborative Research Projects: Where Do I Begin?
The following is a guest post by Andrew Yeo at Catholic University of America. Collaborating with friends, colleagues, and other scholars is a great motivator for research. But if you’re at a small research university with limited institutional resources, the hurdles to do collaborative research beyond co-authoring is higher. Small departments, limited budgets, the absence of relevant research centers/programs, and few ongoing sponsored...
NGO Power Shift 2.0
In her seminal 1997 article, Power Shift, Jessica Mathews argued that a power shift was underway in international politics marked by a redistribution of power from states to non-state actors—mostly businesses and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Almost two decades later, NGOs are trying to foster a new sort of power shift, this time transferring power from the global north to the global south. This power shift was one of the substantive...
You Never Give Me Your Money/ You Only Give Me Your Funny Paper
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...
Free Data, Get Your Data Here
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...