by Dan Nexon | 12 Jan 2013 | Featured
French troops took on an active combat role in Mali yesterday. Mark Leon Goldberg provides a short overview. After long delays, western African troops are reported to be headed for the country as well. There are interesting resonances here with Barak Mendelsohn's Combating Jihadism. In Syria, a jihadist group overran a government airbase. David Collier on Iran's Kurdish population. Marc Lynch assesses the "battle over Egypt's constitution."...
by PM | 11 Jan 2013 | Featured
Reader Anjali Dayal sends along this image from Foreign Policy (since corrected): Presumably Mr. Putin has not yet overturned Roe v. Wade. (On the other hand, I am reminded of this Onion classic.)
by Dan Nexon | 11 Jan 2013 | Featured
Brad Delong calls this "hoisted from the archives," which is clearly a better term for what I'm doing. But, as that's taken and I'm not as smart as the great economics professor, I guess I'll just have to stick with this alternative. Guns and Genocide, version 96.12b From 11 June 2005 After the 1989 massacre of pro-democracy advocates in Tiananmen Square by the People’s Liberation Army, the NRA ran advertisements claiming that if the protesters...
by Dan Nexon | 11 Jan 2013 | Featured
About a year ago I introduced an ocasional series called "Quarter-Baked Ideas." The idea was to blog about semi-formed thoughts related to international affairs. The whole notion turned about to be quarter-baked: I haven't done another one until now. Do rising powers have an intrinsic advantage in "flexibility" when compared to dominant ones? The answer to this question matters a great deal, I submit, to debates over the persistence and decline...
by Amanda Murdie | 10 Jan 2013 | Featured
It’s that time of year again: the time when professors team up with their best buddies/colleagues/random-people-who-publish-in-the-same-area and endeavor to write a brilliant ISA/Midwest/APSA paper. At least, that’s what the spring semester always means for me. I like working by myself, don’t get me wrong, but I also enjoy working with others. And, I don’t think I’m alone here: coauthored work is quickly becoming the norm in political...
by Rodger Payne | 10 Jan 2013 | Featured
Yesterday, Dan Drezner's "one post about American gun violence" explicitly linked the post-Newtown debate about gun violence to Kevin Drum's interesting and provocative Mother Jones article on the disturbing relationship between lead (Pb) in the environment and criminal violence. "If the White House is smart, they will take, verbatim, Kevin Drum's suggested policy proposals for eliminating lead from our nation's homes and topsoil." Like many of...
by Dan Nexon | 9 Jan 2013 | Featured
Update: so the very first commentator revealed how much this was the product of a bad cold. Indeed, I've completely misnamed the post. It shouldn't be "standard stories" but "contextual assumptions." The most important rhetorical commonplace, in my experience, is exactly what the commentator said: "quality" of research and presentation. What I'm interested in is the broader issue of how we know what quality is and why we care about it--what are...
by Dan Nexon | 9 Jan 2013 | Featured
Via Ari Kohen, a visualization of the nearest 100,000 stars in Sol's neighborhood. Sometimes blogs should just share cool stuff, no? Can't leave all that stuff to other social-media platforms.
by Brian Rathbun | 9 Jan 2013 | Featured
The Canard "All the fake news that fit to print" --Washington A new report issued Tuesday by the American Political Science Association reveals that compared to their counterparts in American politics, comparative politics and political theory, international relations scholars are twenty times likelier to have a belly button fetish. “There is an epidemic of navel-gazing among today’s great experts in foreign affairs and something must be done,”...
by Dan Nexon | 9 Jan 2013 | Featured
I'm home sick. With my daughter. Who is also sick. So this will be brief. Sean Kay makes the "case for Chuck Hagel" at the Huffington Post. Daniel Larison slams Jonah Goldberg and other "petty, spiteful critics of Hagel." The Onion reports that Israel "plan to use veto power" against Hagel. Michael Flynn gives the Hagel debate a political-science spin. Reihan Salam defends American hegemony. The rise of actual neo-fascism in Hungary. Adam Elkus...
by Laura Sjoberg | 8 Jan 2013 | Featured
The International Feminist Journal of Politics announces its 2nd Annual IFjP Conference, May 17-19, 2013, University of Sussex, Brighton, England: (Im)possibly Queer International Feminisms General Keynote: Lisa Duggan, American Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, NYU Queer Film Screening: Circumstance (2011), Introduced by Director Maryam Keshavarz. with Q&A to follow Conference Theme Keynotes: Jon Binnie, Geography, Manchester...
by Dan Nexon | 8 Jan 2013 | Featured
There's been significant interest in Steve Saideman's criticisms of Mearsheimer's and Walt's working paper, "Leaving Theory Behind: Why Hypothesis Testing Has Become Bad for IR." Indeed, there are many comments in a discussion that harkens back to older posts at the Duck. Given this, it strikes me as appropriate to add PTJ's and my paper (PDF)--solicited for the same special issue as Mearsheimer's and Walt's--to the Duck of Minerva Working...