On Thursday, I became part of a growing group of academics that has had a letter like this written about them: As a parent, I’ve been doing some advocacy about my children’s school this year. The advocacy received some local media attention recently when my children’s District Administration tried to defend an activity that violated federal privacy rights. Luckily, I’m in a department where, instead of encouraging me to be silent, senior...
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Comparing World Crises
On my second day in Belgium, the Atlantik-Brücke conference, a Canada-Germany conversation, got underway and was immediately quite interesting. The opening session had two speakers that provided broad surveys of the world's crises, and I was struck that there seemed to be some comparisons that did not work for me. Why? Because some crises are harder than others and that we can focus on three dimensions of each crisis so that we can compare...
There is No Lone Wolf Terrorism: but there is anxiety about brown men, loneliness, and mental illness
There's something about 'lone wolf terrorism' debates that stinks. I can't quite find a singular source of the smell, but after further investigation, it seems the relatively recent surge in the use of the category 'lone wolf' to describe individual acts of political violence draws on extremely rank racist, sexist, and alarmist logic. When you compare the sparse literature on lone wolf terrorism and the slough of articles on the topic, one...
Friday Nerd Blogging: Game of Thrones Returns
To celebrate the return of Game of Thrones, which is chock full of IR, I am posting a cartoon and a video (spoilers and NSFW language lurk below the break): And for Key and Peele's take on the show: Enjoy the next ten weeks of GoT!
Gender in IR, Now at the Cutting Edge
[Note: The following is a guest post by Prof. Dan Reiter of Emory University] Joshua Goldstein wrote in the preface to his award-winning, 2001 book War and Gender that while finishing his book he “discovered a list of unfinished research projects, which I had made fifteen years ago at the end of graduate school. About ten lines down is ‘gender and war,’ with the notation ‘most interesting of all; will ruin career—wait until tenure.’” This was...
New directions in academic publishing
I've wrote a post today with Bethany Albertson for The Monkey Cage. The post reports the findings from a recent article we wrote for the relatively new academic journal Research and Politics. The article includes a survey experiment we conducted to assess what messages, if any, the American public finds persuasive on climate change. Both represent interesting departures in the academic blogosphere and publishing. The Monkey Cage The Monkey Cage...
Thinking about the intellectual future of higher education
Recently, articles have emerged in both the United States and the United Kingdom concerned over the current politico-intellectual trend toward diminishing the importance and funding of the humanities and social sciences (HSS). For all the reasons the authors indicate, this trend is problematic. STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) disciplines are of course incredibly important. But they are only part of the collective agenda of...
Memories of Rumsfeld’s Snowflakes
I have written before about my Rummy experiences, but wanted tor revisit after seeing this post yesterday at vox. I was able to dig through Rummy's website and found the document that spawned a heap of paperwork at my desk on the Joint Staff. In the aftermath of 9/11, many allies, partners and others offered to help the US, and since Rumsfeld didn't want allies on the battlefield (with a few exceptions), he wanted to use these offers to get...
Power and Negotiation: A Geopolitical Waltz
The following is a guest post submitted by Valentina Amuso and Kyle McNally. Is the US in an inevitable spiral of decline? Is China rising as the new hegemon? These are a few of the new dinner table topics of the 21st century. The latest iteration of such questions can be found in the discourse surrounding current economic negotiations. In this area most attention is focused squarely on the US and China; however, it must be recognised that...
Open Thread on Surveillance, Snowden, and John Oliver
Last night, John Oliver (the comedian no less!) had a terrific interview with Edward Snowden, which was much more introspective and challenging than the Oscar-winning documentary Citizenfour. Oliver sought to grapple with the necessity for secrecy in intelligence and the moral responsibility Snowden faces for trusting journalists to properly vet what materials to release and subsequent errant release of sensitive material (like anti-ISIS...
Open Thread – Iran Deal – Pros and cons
I've been reading some interesting exchanges on Facebook about the pros and cons of the Iran deal, and though I've been snowed under by grading to have much bandwidth for blogging of late, I thought I would start an open thread here. Fareed Zakaria laid out the case for a deal before it happened in this post, seeing a deal (but presumably not just any deal) as better than the alternatives, continued sanctions and airstrikes, which to him had...
Stumbling Through Foreign Policy – Not History
Last week Joe Scarborough from Politico raised the question of why US foreign policy in the Middle East is in “disarray.” Citing all of the turmoil from the past 14 years, he posits that both Obama and Bush’s decisions for the region are driven by “blind ideology [rather] than sound reason.” Scarborough wonders what historians will say about these policies in the future, but what he fails to realize is that observers of foreign policy and...