There are many things I find unsurprising about Robert Orisko's claims in the Georgetown Public Policy Review about hiring patterns in academic political science. Among those are the disparate reactions produced by its summary in Inside Higher Education. In brief, Orisko argues that academic political-science hiring displays dynamics more associated with status-conserving cliques than an efficient market. This tracks with (more...
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What’s Wrong With This Picture?
This graph comes to you from a newly published article on the politics of the drone campaign published this week in International Studies Perspectives. I haven't yet read the full piece so cannot yet comment on it substantively or theoretically. Nor have I looked closely at the authors' code-book. However based on the abstract, the analysis appears to rest on the empirical evidence of a newly coded dataset (the latest of many out there...
Wednesday Mid-day Linkage
Ghana votes. Egyptian protesters move from Tahrir to the presidential palace. Rio's Olympics clean-up uncovers policemen collaborating with drug cartels. Chronicle of Higher Education visualization of gender and publication records across disciplines and over time. Political science not doing so well. For those interested in civilian casualties and war, Chinamanda Adichie has written a moving and very informative review of Chinua Achebe's...
In the year 2000….
Hi everyone. I haven’t been around much lately as I’ve been furiously writing a book. But it is almost done and I’m feeling reflective. Have you missed me? I’ve missed you. What’s that you say? Why yes, this is a new shirt. Thank you for noticing. I thought that I would offer some thoughts about where I think international relations research is heading in the near to medium-term future, based on what I’ve noticed about the job market, what...
Leader Comebacks
"This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." So spoke Winston Churchill, after the Allied victory in the Second Battle of El Alamein. We could say much the same of his defeat in the 1945 general election. A core assumption underlying most of the work analyzing the impact of domestic politics on international relations is that leaders want to remain in office. Insofar as...
Guest Blogger News
We have two exciting developments to report concerning guest bloggers at the Duck. First, Adrienne LeBas' From Protest to Parties: Party-Building and Democratization in Africa (Oxford University Press, 2011) has been awarded "Best Book in African Politics" at the 2012 African Studies Association Annual Meeting by the African Politics Conference Group. Many congratulations to Adrienne on this well-deserved prize. Second, we are excited to...
Tuesday Morning Linkage
Dan's still ill so you're stuck with me for Day Two. Here's some links: Via The Monkey Cage (I'm not stealing, I'm curating) comes this link to an Inside Higher Ed article about the five-year humanities Ph.D.. Identity, legacy, institutions, and Indiana basketball One of the things that grabs me about IR scholarship is that (to my knowledge) churches are not among the IOs or NGOs that we study on their own terms. But consider the Anglican...
What I Did Not Know About the Prof Business
In the recent conversations about Policy PhDs and such, one of the frequent assertions was that people going into PhD programs had no idea what they were getting into. Why do we assert such things? All I can say is that I had no clue not just about what was involved in a PhD program, but also what was involved in being a prof. Let me review some of my beliefs and the realities I have experienced over the past two decades.* * I will leave...
Human rights NGOs: Just Hot Air?
Charli’s posts on Human Rights Watch and Autonomous Weapons got me thinking: should we really expect human rights international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to influence weapons systems? On the whole, human rights NGOs are a pretty powerless lot: NGOs don’t control military resources like states do and they are typically not at the decision-making table. Why would a powerful state ever listen to the musings of an NGO? Are all of...
Monday Morning Linkage
Dan's sick, so he's asked me to put together three to five links ... of doom! Unfortunately, I've been writing a lot recently and so I've missed out on great posts. So here's what I found in a burst of searching; please suggest additional links in the comments. At Foreign Policy, Jack Carlson argues China is building replica European cities to prove its cultural superiority. Also at Foreign Policy, this Boeing advertising Web site was...
Follow Up on Academic-Policy Divide
As it turns out, there are a group of scholars working to bridge this divide. Check out the Bridging the Gap Project. The project has programs for new and not-so-new scholars in the US and abroad. This seems to be exactly what we need. Take a look and consider applying (soon since the Dec 5 deadline is upon us).
World AIDS Day 2012: A Moment for Optimism?
Today is World AIDS Day, an annual opportunity to take stock of the state of the epidemic. Despite a decade of incredible mobilization of finance for and visibility of the AIDS pandemic, UNAIDS estimated that the number of new infections last year 2.5 million still far outstripped the 1.4 million people who received treatment for the first time. There has been some good news. 8 million of the 15 million people thought sick enough to need...