Today, Kate Brannen’s piece in Foreign Policy sent mixed messages with regard to the US-led coalition fighting the Islamic State (IS). She reports that the US is balancing demands “For intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) assets across Iraq and Syria with keeping an eye on Afghanistan”. The implication, which the title of her piece implies, is that if the US just had more “drones” over Syria, it would be able to fight IS more...
This was another busy week in global politics and I'm going to highlight some of the best tweets in my Twitter feed. Before starting, however, I will acknowledge that this post is late. I believe my excuse is pretty good as it involves lots of late night baseball. I grew up in Kansas rooting for the local team -- and the Kansas City Royals are in the playoffs for the first time since winning the World Series in 1985. Tuesday, Thursday, and...
This is a guest post from Ariel I. Ahram (@ariel_ahram), an assistant professor of government and international affairs in Virginia Tech’s School of Public and International Affairs in Alexandria, Va. He is the author of Proxy Warriors: The Rise and Fall of State Sponsored Militias (Stanford University Press, 2011). Laments over the state of Israel have become increasingly common. Especially in the midst of this summer’s war in Gaza, Israel’s...
Well, this has been a very difficult period to watch as we see the unfolding tragedy of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. We have seen dire warnings for the region, with a dramatic uptick in reported infections and some heartbreaking (and problematic) images from hospitals. There have been credible projections that left unchecked Ebola could have as many 1.4 million infections by early 2015 in Liberia and Sierra Leone, which would amount to...
You hear the “ping” of an incoming email and quickly check the subject – oh, crap, it’s from a journal![1] This could make or break your day. You open the email and quickly scan for the word “reject.” Wait? What!? No “reject”? No “Unfortunately, their assessments do not provide us with sufficient support to continue the review process”? Does this mean what you think it means? You now read the letter closely, your pulse starting to rise. ...
This is a guest post from Leslie Johns, an Assistant Professor of political science at UCLA. The Public Choice Society---an academic organization of scholars who study the interaction of politics and economics---recently announced that it has created a new award for scholarly research: the Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Prize. The announcement of this prize is provoking an intense reaction because of its name: “The Vincent and Elinor Ostrom...
It's the weekend, so it's time for the third edition of “Tweets of the Week.” My twitter feed was again filled with some interesting micro-blogging. By the way, I apologize for the way last week's home page post looked. Obviously, I'm doing something wrong with the images, though it seems to be fine once the reader clicks the link to Continue Reading. I hope readers can see the image at the top of this page. This week, the bombing campaign...
Steve and I had a good Twitter exchange with Tom Ricks about whether or not political science is useless to policymakers, particularly quantitative work and modeling. I thought this exchange was funny because today I saw that Colin Kahl, friend and more importantly, a damn good political scientist, was just appointed as Vice President Biden's National Security Advisor. Ricks' broadside has provoked a few choice blog posts from Steve, Paul...
Josh’s post on his experience with course evaluations has gotten me thinking about the practice of using course evaluations. Because my personal circumstances differ from Josh’s (e.g. I do not have children), I have been able to avoid some of the painful tradeoffs he discusses and have not yet had to confront ‘bad’ evaluations. Reading his post, however, prompted me to connect some dots that have been floating around in my head regarding the...
In a phone call today with a friend working on issues pertaining to the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), an interesting question arose. In particular, what types of conflict are going on with the fight against ISIS? My friend wanted to draw attention to the R2P aspects of the crisis, and whether the “intervention” on the side of the US was just according to these standards. While this is certainly an interesting question, I think it points us...
So, I got some bad teaching evaluations from last semester (bad by my standards at least. Hell, by anybody's standards). It's kind of thrown me for a loop because I pride myself on being a good scholar, a good teacher, and a good husband/father. But, sometimes it may not be possible to pull off all three of these things well simultaneously, especially if you've got an ambitious research agenda, equally challenging and risky courses, and a...
This is a guest post from Jennifer Hadden, who is an assistant professor at the University of Maryland. She guest blogged on the Duck before on global climate negotiations. She also has a forthcoming book from Cambridge on climate advocacy called Networks in Contention: The Divisive Politics of Climate Change. The largest climate change demonstration in history took place on Sunday. According to organizers of the People’s Climate March, an...