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...
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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...
The Scarcity of Politics in Cosmopolitan Theory: Part I
Syria has raised several questions that pertain to morality, legality, and strategy in international relations. Discussed extensively on the Duck, Opinio Juris, The Monkey Cage, and elsewhere the situation in Syria has sparked a valuable debate on critical issues, both old and new. I would like to touch upon the implications of Syria for Cosmopolitanism. I think Syria has again highlighted the core dilemma of Cosmopolitan theory: the scarcity...
Symposium — Response to Christine Sylvester, “Experiencing the End of IR Theory/End of War”
Sylvester productively draws out the implications of the current ‘camp’ structure of IR: on the one hand, the proliferation of ‘camps’ and communities within IR increases the opportunities for publication and advancement for those whose work does not conform to traditional disciplinary norms; on the other hand, the emergence of camps with their own journals, books series, ISA/BISA sections and common citations productive dialogue across and...
Symposium — War is Human
Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Christine Sylvester. It is the 19th installment in our "End of IR Theory" companion symposium for the special issue of the European Journal of International Relations. SAGE has temporarily ungated all of the articles in that issue. This post refers to Sylvester's article (PDF). A response, authored by Lauren Wilcox, will appear at 11am Eastern. Other entries in the symposium--when available--may be...
How Could US Signals of Weakness bring Russia and Syria to the Table?
That's essentially the question Steve Saideman asked here (and which he more explicitly asked on Twitter). His answer, which I find problematic, is But here is the big problem in all of this: perhaps much of IR is not about bargaining and persuasion about commitment and resolve. Perhaps much of IR is a conflict of interests, and that countries engage in conflict when their various interests cannot be resolved. He goes on to say The amateur game...
Meta-theory and Practical Knowledge: Reflections on Reus-Smit’s ‘Beyond Meta-theory’
Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Milja Kurki. It is the 18th installment in our "End of IR Theory" companion symposium for the special issue of the European Journal of International Relations. SAGE has temporarily ungated all of the articles in that issue. This post refers to Reus-Smit's article (PDF). His post appeared earlier today. Other entries in the symposium--when available--may be reached via the "EJIR Special Issue Symposium"...