Maryum Alam is a political science Ph.D. Candidate (ABD) at The Ohio State University, specializing in international relations and quantitative political methodology. Her research revolves around foreign policy decision-making and its implications for the use of force abroad. Maryum’s dissertation investigates the sources and consequences of leader time horizons on the maintenance of coercive foreign policies, including military interventions...
World Refugee Day was last week (June 20). Ideally I would have written this then, but I haven't been as good on real-time commenting since Twitter fell apart. I still found it important to say something here, though. I am not an expert on this issue. I wrote one article on religious repression and forced migration, but my co-author had the subject matter expertise. I've written a few letters in support of asylum seeker resettlement in Vermont,...
If you spent the entire Friday night and Saturday glued to the news about Prigozhin's armed rebellion, you are either an IR-head, a Russia-watcher or the Ukrainian army running out of popcorn. The avalanche of hot-takes about the start of a civil war, theoretical debates about a coup or not a coup and an army of blue-check grifters with the latest FSB letters reigned the day. The pundits who rushed to their keyboards with the news of Russia's...
I just returned from a two month fellowship at Edinburgh University, accompanied by my family. The trip included talks in Germany, Italy and England. These side-trips required a lot of packing, and generated a lot of souvenirs, specifically snow globes to mark each place we visited. This led to a problem when going through airport security, however. Snow globes count as liquids, and have to be included in those annoying little plastic bags; as...
Like millions of other people around the world, I have spent much of the past few weeks playing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (TotK), the nineteenth installment in Nintendo’s widely acclaimed series.
There is an increasing focus in academic and policy circles on research-policy partnerships. These partnerships are often achieved through co-creation, or “the joint production of innovation between combinations of industry, research, government and civil society.” Co-creation is central to innovation in the hard sciences and technology, but its role in international relations scholarship and aid policy remains underdeveloped. As scholars of...
Susanna P. Campbell is an Associate Professor at the School of International Service, the Director of the Research on International Policy Implementation Lab (RIPIL) at American University, and a current Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Her research examines interactions between international and domestic actors in fragile and conflict-affected contexts, addressing debates in the statebuilding, peacebuilding,...
Haley J. Swedlund is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, Centre for International Conflict Analysis and Management (CICAM) at Radboud University in The Netherlands. Her research focuses on international actors in the Global South. She is the author of The Development Dance: How Donors and Recipients Negotiate Foreign Aid (Cornell University Press, 2017) and has published her research in journals such as African...
Over the past two decades, ’Dapo has worked at the intersection of governance, public policy, international development, management consulting and global affairs. In the public sector, he has served as Special Adviser on International & Interparliamentary Affairs to the Speaker of Nigeria’s House of Representatives; and also, as a Special Adviser to two cabinet ministers, first at the Nigerian Presidency’s National Planning Commission and...
Dr. Oumar Ba of Cornell University visits the Hayseed Scholar podcast. Dr. Ba grew up in Senegal, attending his first school at an early age near the Senegal-Mauritania border. He developed an interest in politics in high school and at his first university (Cheik Anna Diop in Dakar) where he pursued Geography. Oumar moved to the United States in early 2001, taking a Greyhound Bus from New York to Ohio. Following a series of jobs, including one...
I replicated the go-to method for using ChatGPT to “cheat” on college essays. Here are my takeaways.
UPDATE: As a commenter helpfully pointed out, the person whose tweet I'm responding to was a political science Professor, not a historian. This kind of messes with the framing of this post but rather than stealth re-write it I'll leave it as is and let you interpret my Freudian slip as you like When I was in grad school, my Department's grad student organization made shirts that read, "Political Science: Four sub-fields, no discipline." Behind...