The subfield of international relations seems to suffer from an inferiority complex. While most subfields of political science do their research and trust that the results are relevant to policy for a good reason, many an international relations scholar complains that the subfield is not relevant enough. The latest example is Campbell and Desch, who worry that rankings of departments are biased against policy relevance in international...
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Thursday Morning Linkage
After last week's diplomatic overtures on Syria, we've entered a period of relative calm and back to our mixed bag of stories of interest. NPR is running a fabulous series on Brazil in the lead up to the World Cup, which is also timely since the Brazilian president cancelled her plans to visit the United States as a result of U.S. spying on her and other Brazilians, a revelation that came out of the Snowden affair. In other news, I'm going to...
Analytic Eclecticism, Phantom Confrontations, and Dialogue: On Reus-Smit´s “Beyond Metatheory?”
[Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Guzman Castro of the University of Pennsylvania. This post refers to an article and post in the European Journal of International Relations-Duck of Minerva symposium on "The End of International Relations Theory?"by Christian Reus-Smit and the corresponding post by Milja Kurki.] Christian Reus-Smit's and Milja Kurki's interventions in the EJIR symposium are part of a laudable mission to defend meta-theory...
Theories Never Die
Having been invited to offer an ‘overall response’ to this special issue, I decided to take a look at how the contributors deal with the editors’ claim that we are witnessing the end of ‘IR Theory’. But let me preface this with an observation. The EJIR editors’ decision to compile this special issue, taken at the 2011 ISA conference in Montreal, occurred parallel to the creation of the ISA Theory Section (in which I was closely involved)....
The Virtues of Quitting
We have all quit from time to time. Choosing when to quit and move on is tough proposition, especially for researchers. I never really thought much about the issue and how it relates to our work until Dave Chappelle brought it home for me recently. I saw his set on the Funny or Die tour during APSA weekend in Chicago. I just had to go; I can only take so many nerdy conversations. Of course Dave Chappelle is famous for quitting his show. Many...
Wednesday Addams Linkage
Brief but important interview with Andrew Gelman. Here's one thing regarding "great applied work": Ask yourself the question: What makes a statistician look like a hero? You might think that the answer would be, Extracting a small faint signal from noise. But I don't think so. I think that a statistician looks like a hero by studying large effects. A history of the firebomb:The effects testing, done very carefully by both universities (Harvard...
Rethinking Academic Rankings
Peter Campbell and Michael Desch write in Foreign Affairs that the National Research Council's rankings of political science departments are systematically biased against international relations scholarship and against policy-relevant scholarship: The NRC’s methodology biased its rankings against two kinds of scholarship: international relations scholarship, which is often book-oriented; and policy-relevant scholarship, which often appears in...
Not Aufklärers but Dilettantes: Reading Michael C. Williams’s “In the Beginning…”
“In the Beginning” joins a growing literature – including my own Recovering International Relations – in which normative claims regarding the vocation of IR theory are tied to an historical account of its disciplinary emergence.* If these arguments vary in their details, they share a common logical-rhetorical tactic. An account of the discipline’s beginnings is mobilized to critique present-day scholarly practices: to spur “reflection on...
The International Relations Enlightenment and the Ends of International Relations Theory
From its very inception IR was a substantive normative and political project.
Monday Linkage
The Navy Yard in DC came under fire this morning. Developing. 9/11 Anniversary commentary of note: Tom Junod on the sanitization of disaster footage. Dan Nexon's original thoughts on this are always worth a re-read. Reframing the anniversary by conservatives (Benghazi) and human rights activists (Santiago). So President Assad pledged to accede to the Chemical Weapons Convention. Yochi Dreazon on why this is no magic bullet. Kevin Jon Heller...
Memory Loss as Imperial Effect
That was the apex of Dependency Theory in the US, I am betting. It wasn’t long before it was shelved in the curio cabinet. Dependency Theory had died from neglect, not from critique.
Core, periphery and (neo) imperalist IR
Other entries in the symposium--when available--may be reached via the "EJIR Special Issue Symposium" tag.Terms such as core and periphery (or third world) are largely passé, and may even be conceptually and heuristically objectionable on the grounds that they are rooted in dichotomous language that reproduces power differentials between diverse actors and sites around the world. However, core-periphery like logics similar to those described...