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,...
Recently, Suzanne Nossel published a piece critical of US and EU sanctions against Russia. A number of her points make sense. For US-EU sanctions to really isolate Russia and thus have a chance to change Russian behavior in the short term, they need to have the participation of other major states in the system like China and India. Without those states, the isolation effort is doomed to fail. Moreover, the effect of US-EU sanctions will fade...
A friend of mine mis-typed Sharknado and found this: And, of course, as someone who co-authored a book on NATO, I could not help but consider the picture and then over-analyze. Specifically, the Dave and Steve book considers, among other things, the caveats or restrictions that countries placed on their contingents in Afghanistan and missions near/over Libya. So, the natural (natural to me, anyway) question to consider are the various...
A recent Pew poll says that they are. According to Pew, "at least half of Germans, French and Italians say their country should not use military force to defend a NATO ally if attacked by Russia." Indeed, the news is grim. The public release informs us that, "Americans and Canadians are the only publics where more than half think their country should use military action if Russia attacks a fellow NATO member (56% and 53%, respectively)....
Yesterday, I had the chance to participate in the Bridging the Gap workshop led by Bruce Jentleson. It is an effort every summer to help younger scholars figure out how to engage the policy world in a variety of ways, including figuring out how to write and publish op-eds, how to get into government for short periods of time (like the Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellowship that changed my career/life), how to engage...
In my last two posts (here, here), I wrote about a recent Foreign Affairs piece that proposed lifting the ban on trading rhino horn and the political and substantive reasons why such an idea is problematic. Are there reasons to think that a one-off sale or even a permanent normalization of the trade might go well? While Save the Rhino is against one-off sales, it is a little more equivocal on a semi-permanent regulation of the trade (though I...