and Failure leads to Fear, Anger and all that Stuff. In the renewed discussion of the Battle of Hoth and other failures of the Galactic Empire, there is a running theme throughout many of the posts: how does a leader get the underlings to do what they are supposed to do. Given the affinity between the dark side of the force and Principal-Agency theory,* it is somewhat surprising that nearly all of these analyses have been atheoretical and...
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5 Biggest Strategic Errors of the Emperor: a Contribution to the ‘Battle of Hoth’ Debate
You can’t win a counter-insurgency with a military like this The Duck has gotten into an excellent debate with Ackerman on the Empire’s blown opportunity to stamp out the Space Vietcong Rebellion at Hoth. Westmoreland spent 5 years trying to nail down the VC in set-piece battles where US firepower could be brought decisively to bear and end the war. Here was the Emperor’s similar chance, but Vader and Admiral Ozzel blew it (mostly...
When does social change happen? Revisiting How to Survive a Plague
With the Oscars fast approaching, one documentary How to Survive a Plague is a likely winner (though may lose out to my second favorite documentary of the year Searching for Sugar Man). How to Survive a Plague is, as I described in my earlier review, an emotionally redolent account of ACT UP's mobilization to move the U.S. government and the pharmaceuticals industry to bring life-extending AIDS drugs from the labs to market and into...
The Force is strong with this one
Episode I: Spencer Ackerman over at Danger Room posts this analysis of the Battle of Hoth. Episode II: 90 e-mails and twelve hours later, this symposium goes up on the Danger Room website including a contribution by our own Dan Nexon. Unfortunately, not all of us involved in the furious e-mail thread made the cut or the deadline, so not all of our replies were posted. Which brings us to: Episode III: my piece, sadly not included in the Danger...
A Short History and Critique of Climate Negotiations: All Climate Politics is Local
I gave a guest lecture for undergraduates on the state of global climate negotiations yesterday for a law school colleague here at the University of Texas. In light of the president's strong but ambiguous comments in the State of the Union last night threatening executive action if the Congress doesn't act, I thought I'd share my notes here and would welcome comments from others about whether I've done justice to the arc of negotiations. My aim...
The Arab Spring and Securitization Theory
This is a guest post by Jarrod Hayes. Jarrod is Assistant Professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs. He received his PhD in Politics and International Relations from the University of Southern California in 2009. His research broadly focuses on the social construction of foreign and security policy. He is currently trying to determine what should be on the cover of his forthcoming book from Cambridge University Press while...
Lunch-Time Linkage
Japan's "looming singularity." Xavier Marquez has lots of infographics about the "normativeness of democracy." The nuke content in Obama SOTU address. I'm skeptical of both the feasibility and utility of further nuclear arms control with the Russian Federation, but I'm down with cooperative-threat-reduction activity. BLTN: NUKEMAP! Walt argues that US existential security promotes adventurism. And also: Uncertainty about Russian military...
Current Political Scientist to Congress: Please Ignore Greg Ferenstein
Another day, another op-ed or blog post saying that the social sciences contribute nothing and that we must be more policy-centric or policy-relevant or policy-synergistic or policy-policy-policy-policy. You know, it's funny. I've just finished reading a history of Bell labs (these journalistic nonfiction books go by quick--about the same time as a movie and a half) and the takeaway was that apparently esoteric research (e.g. Claude Shannon's...
Tuesday Morning Linkage Club
Tim Burke suggests ways to fix the dissertation, but I'm skeptical that the way to reduce the overproduction of Ph.D.s is to lower the costs of earning a Ph.D. [Easily Distracted] Will Moore wonders what the standard for presenting results as a consensus is; a response to Voeten and Nexon. Via Anton Strezhnev, a critique of Pad Thai. [The Morning News] Yet it’s not entirely fair to complain about the authenticity of Pad Thai. It’s the noodle...
What Patterns of Trade Might Tell us About the Democratic Peace
Stop me if you've heard this one: it appears that wars between pairs of democracies are relatively rare compared to wars between other pairs of states. Some people even think this relationship might be causal. In the decades since this empirical regularity first got everyone's attention, a number of different theoretical arguments have been developed to account for it. A little known problem with all such explanations is that their additional...
The Politics of “Political Science”: Mushroom Cloud Edition
Erik Voeten has a nice piece up about recent research on the benefits of nuclear superiority. Does nuclear superiority provide an advantage to states engaged in crisis bargaining? In the most recent issue of International Organization (ungated version) my colleague Matthew Kroenig argues that in a crisis between two nuclear powers, the state that enjoys a nuclear advantage is willing to run more risk than its opponent. This gives the nuclear...
Podcast No. 20 – Interview with Phil Schrodt
The twentieth Duck of Minerva podcast features Phil Schrodt of Pennsylvania State University. The interview includes Professor Schrodt's views on a number of interesting topics, including the history of quantitative and computational conflict studies, his "seven deadly sins" project, advice for graduate students in political science, and an explanation of his decision to take up blogging. This is the third podcast to...