Grand Strategy is an arcane and misapplied concept. Developing a Grand Strategy to deal with China that focuses on cyber capabilities is a dangerous move that will have large repercussions for the international system. The National Interest recently hosted a debate about the merits of the Air Sea Battle strategy versus the Offshore Control strategy. Here, I focus on the newly developed Air Sea Battle strategy since it is likely the more...
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Monday morning links
The international news continues to be dominated by Saturday's terrorist attack at Westgate Mall in Nairobi, Kenya. The coverage of the attacks in most major newspapers has been excellent (and peppered with first-person reflections) due to the large number of reporters and photojournalists who are based in Nairobi. Somali Islamist group Al-Shabaab claimed responsibility via Twitter, and Twitter struggled to deactivate its feeds. The immediate...
Women and the residential fellowship: a few thoughts
In my email inbox last week was a notification of a fellowship opportunity. Since I have a sabbatical coming up shortly—okay, in a couple of years, but time flies, right?—I eagerly skimmed the details. It’s a fellowship squarely in my field. The funding is pretty generous, probably enough to help me buy out some extra time at my institution, and finish the damn book that is core to my next promotion. But at the end of the description, there...
Friday Nerd Blogging: The End Is Nigh, Say It Ain’t So
Breaking Bad is down to two episodes left. Just like a great book, you want to desperately get to the end until you realize that the end means the end of a great story-telling experience. So, here is one set of folks pondering the end with heaps of spoilers.
And on that note…
It seems altogether appropriate to me that my last Duck post should be a post about pedagogy. The more years I spend in this business, the more convinced I am that our area of greatest impact, and the place where our academic vocations are most clearly on display, is the classroom. Whether in-person or virtual, hi-tech or low-tech, as a permanent member of a faculty or as a visitor coming in to guest-teach or participate in a single class...
Friday Morning Linkage
The Assad regime says the Syrian conflict is at a stalemate. Meanwhile a cease-fire between Free Syrian Army and Islamic State in Iraq and Syria forces in Azaz. Roy Gutman from McClatchy reports on some of the dynamics between FSA and radical Islamists. Battling it out in public -- McCain in Pravda responding to Putin; Rouhani in yesterday's Washington Post; Assad on Fox. New pressure to bring Israel into the Chemical Weapons Convention?...
What if Iran Did Get the Bomb?
Casual observation suggests that the two most common answers to the question above are: 1) there's a very good chance that they'd start a nuclear war with Israel; and 2) there's no real reason to think any other state would be impacted in any significant way. I find both unpersuasive for reasons I'll discuss below. Before I do, though, let me get something out of the way---in this post, I will argue neither for nor against the use of force to...
Podcasting Killed the Lecturing Star
The first video ever played on MTV, back when MTV played music videos most of the time, was the one-hit wonder "Video Killed the Radio Star" by The Buggles. A lament about how new technology ended the career of a singer who was well-adapted to the production standards and genre constraints of an earlier era, the song recounts an irreversible process: In my mind and in my car We can't rewind we've gone too far Pictures came and broke your heart...
What Is Policy Relevance, and (How) Should We Reward International Relations Scholars for It?
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...
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)....