This is of interest only to international-relations theorists and fellow travelers. A long-standing claims about hegemonic orders is that they are normative ones: that a dominant power uses a wide variety of power resources to create a set of international rules and regimes conducive to its ideological and material interests. After World War II the United States worked actively to promote norms and institutions consistent with a broadly...
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Ducklings!
Along with the face-lift come some new faces to the Duck. Well, new names anyway. We recruited this year based on the desire to increase diversity on the blog, particularly in methodology and area expertise; and also to cover some staple topics while one or more permanent contributors (myself included) cut back for a time to finish book projects and deal with other commitments. Please welcome the following guest bloggers to our site for the...
Monday Morning Linkage
Analysis of the Chinese 052D Luyang III-class destroyer. David Schorr's April "resolve fairy" post that almost certainly influenced my account of the Romney-Ryan doctrine. Will Romney escalate tensions with China? More on the Iranian-supplied Hezbollah drone downed by Israel. Against Pakistani "sovereignty" objections to US operations. Ukraine supposedly weaponizes dolphins. Jay compares Georgia and Venezuela. Phil Arena discusses "formal...
EU and the Peace Prize (Round 2)
The initial reaction from Facebook and from my Realist friends reveals a certain amount of scorn for the Nobel Peace Prize announcement this morning. The EU today is an easy parody and I guess the response is to be expected. Nonetheless, I appreciate Erik Voeten’s post that Dan linked below and share his bottom line that this is a decent decision. I would just add a couple of additional points. First, I agree that if we evaluate or judge...
The Politics of the Hunger Games
As I've mentioned before, one of the projects that I'm working on now is a book provisionally entitled "The Politics of the Hunger Games." PM and I are overdue in submitting a full proposal to the press. In an earlier post I sketched out some provisional chapter titles. Here I provide a more complete list and a synopsis of the final chapter. This is definitely a "crowdsourcing" post, so comments are appreciated. Details and spoilers below the...
Friday Morning Debate Reaction
I scored the Romney-Obama debate as a tactical win for Romney. As of now, it looks more like a strategic one. The lesson for me, I think, is not to assess the political ramifications of debates. So in this post, I'll simply stick to reflecting on the foreign-policy component of the debate, which turned out to be much more prominent than most of us expected. The bottom line is that, with the exception of the earlier Libya exchange, Biden owned...
The EU Peace Prize
Erik Voeten is pleased: The Realist argument about the importance of the U.S. security umbrella is probably correct. Yet, the dire predictions regarding the future of European integration have yet to materialize. Indeed, the EU sped up its integration considerably with the end of the Cold War; creating deeper institutions and adding fifteen new member states. The integration of the Eastern European former socialist states has not gone without...
Announcement: The Duck of Minerva is Moving (UPDATED)
Update: the Duck has moslty migrated (and that sentence makes sense in a non-technical context! Score!). Comment migration is in process, so probably not a good time for a magnum opus response. The existing RSS feed should work, so no need to change that. Vikash designed our new banner. The template is likely to shift some over the next week or so. Let us know about missing functionality, aestehic issues, and other stuff. Obviously, FB,...
Podcast No. 11 – Interview with Janice Bially Mattern
Featuring Janice Bially Mattern. From 2012.
Friday Morning Linkage
Georgetown University's debate coach comments (video) on the first presidential debate of 2012. PM's not the only one to respond to John Quiggin's post on the US Navy; Robert Farley also has a lot to say. Jeremy Keenan provides an overview of the Mali civil war at allAfrica. The Syrian civil war continues. Michael Krepon revisits Robert Jervis' The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution.Ryan Evans: "All Politics and Civil War is Local: Helmand's...
Stuff Political Scientists Like #17: Outside Offers, or Stuff Other Political Scientists Like
Political scientists like to complain about how little they are paid, which tends to be irritating to any number of other groups, most notably anyone who has a job other than that of a political scientist and has to be into the office say, before noon. Part of the reason that political scientists are so poorly compensated for their great contribution to humankind is that they are only rewarded when others from outside their organization value...
Does naval success invalidate the need for navies?
Acting was a big part of Battleship. At Crooked Timber, John Quiggin writes a post that seeks to sink a thousand ships: The trillions of dollars that have been spent on building, maintaining and scrapping fleets since 1945 has yielded almost zero benefits to the nations that have spent this money, in the belief that all respectable countries should have a navy. China’s carrier is an extreme example. About the best that can be said is that a...