At the BISA/ISA panel on pluralism Jennifer Sterling-Folker stressed that realism is not the "dominant paradigm" of North American international-relations scholarship. Instead, she argued, neoliberal institutionalism rules the roost. How do we know this? Among other reasons, neoliberal institutionalists don't spend a lot of time on 'big theory' -- on thinking about the scientific ontology of world politics. They take their worldview for...
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“Having it all” and a (non-essentialist) feminist politics
Anne-Marie Slaughter's recent Atlantic article, "Why Women Still Can't Have It All," has stirred up a fair amount of controversy in the last couple of days. Dozens of my Facebook friends have posted and reposted it, and it has prompted many of them to reflect on their personal experiences with womanhood, femininity, parenting, and/or motherhood. Several students have asked me about the article and my opinions on it, and it seems to be stirring...
Friday Nerd Blogging
From Mother Jones, of all places. Gayle Falkenthal comments.
Stuff Political Scientists Like #16 — Summer Break
Political scientists love summer break. They do not sail, as they have no money for a boat. They do not sun bathe, as they would burn outdoors. Spending time with children is not high on the priority list, at least for male political scientists, who generally use their paternity leave as a sabbatical to finish a book. And it is well known that political scientists are all deathly afraid of kites. No, political scientists love summer break for...
IR, Policymakers, and the Gender Balance
I'm pretty sure this is a Soviet poster for International Women's Day.Are IR scholars relevant to policy? IR scholar and famous policymaker Anne-Marie Slaughter addresses that puzzle, which principally concerns only IR scholars, in a roundabout way in a new article in The Atlantic asking whether women can "have it all"--a puzzle that concerns a great many more people. She also addresses these concerns in a follow-up Q&A on The New York Times...
Ranking US Allies: A Response to Stephen Walt, Andrew Sullivan & all those Canadians…
<img alt="" galleryimg="no" onload="var downlevelDiv = document.getElementById('9ab6f160-8fa0-4fcc-a292-405526f7884b'); downlevelDiv.innerHTML = "";" src="https://lh4.ggpht.com/-PqxwrrtujtM/T-JEowomCmI/AAAAAAAAAPA/yY5-l-pt3y8/videocbda4184ad6b%25255B66%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" />Who knew Canada could be so controversial…Last week, I tried to rank US allies, drawing response from both Walt and Sullivan...
Is International Relations Useful?
I just returned from a week long program at American University called Bridging the Gap: the International Policy Summer Institute (IPSI). Organized by the new Dean of AU's School of International Service Jim Goldgeier, Duke's Bruce Jentleson, Berkeley's Steve Weber, and Smith College's Brent Durbin, this was the faculty complement to the New Era program for graduate students that initially started at Berkeley several years ago by Steve, Brent,...
Prometheus and Lawrence of Arabia
[Spoiler Alert: Obviously, you shouldn't read this post if you want to see the movie unfiltered.]Ridley Scott's "Prometheus" (2012) is a film about creation, abortion, and redemptive self-sacrifice. Although elements of the plot do not have as much art or integrity as one might like, the film has moments of complex and sedimented allegory. The film obviously operates at the granular level of biopolitics as well as posing the fundamental...
Is Rio + 20 Going to be a Waste of Time?
This was the tone of an op-ed I pitched regarding the Rio+20 environmental summit. Below the fold, I offer a slightly more nuanced argument ...Rio+20, the twentieth anniversary of the 1992 Earth Summit, kicks off the formal part of the negotiations tomorrow as leaders of 130 countries arrive to take part. It strikes me as a misguided nostalgia tour and will probably achieve even less than the tenth anniversary that took place in South Africa....
Let’s (Keep) Talking About Sex
Foreign Policy just published its latest issue online. The letters section includes a response that expands on my earlier blog post calling the recent "Sex" issue a Teen Magazine. For those interested in reading further, my letter points FP editors to a wider range of scholarship and contributors they might have considered and challenges them to reconsider gender as only a 'special issue:'"Women are half the population (are we still having this...
Gender, Violence and Digital Emergence
One of the most unsettling findings of our media and radicalisation research was the way in which the suffering of certain individual women is turned into a cause by radical Islamic groups that leads to violence by men in those women’s names. The availability of digital media, combined with a certain doctrinal entrepreneurialism by those using religion to justify political violence, has resulted in the widespread dissemination of amateur video...
More on Abusing America’s ‘Exorbitant Privilege’: Will the Bond Market Turn on the US at a 100% Debt-to-GDP ratio?
As part of a now lengthy chain (one, two, three, four) on US allies and the likelihood of US retrenchment, I argued that American hegemony, despite America’s huge debt and deficit, is more financially stable than almost anyone expected. Because foreigners’ appetite for dollars seems unquenchable and because we print the global reserve currency, borrow in it, and face no serious reserve challengers (the euro and RMB maybe, see below), US can...