Our social science faculty association organized a trip to Vietnam last week. It was pretty fascinating. It was my first trip, and I don’t speak the language, so obviously I am qualified to generalize wildly about it now. As Gabriel Almond once quipped, ‘you should never generalize about a country until you’ve at least flown over it. So guess I meet that test at least. Here are some anecdotal, political science-y impressions:1. Communist...
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How to Be a Good Realist
I'm going to delve clumsily into IR Theory here, so I'd be grateful to get some feedback on the question of the 'Realist' minimum.In a fascinating post recently on US-China relations, Stephen Walt wrote:"First, as a good realist, I think that the basic state of Sino-American relations will be driven more by balances of power and configurations of interest than by the personalities of individual leaders. As I've noted before, if China continues...
Friday Nerd Blogging
Cello/sci-fi/heavy-metal nerds, all my favorites rolled into one.
Challenges to Qualitative Research in the Age Of Big Data
Technically, "because I didn't have observational data."Working with experimental data requires onlycalculating means and reading a table. Also, thismay be the most condescending comic stripabout statistics ever produced.The excellent Silbey at the Edge of the American West is stunned by the torrents of data that future historians will be able to deal with. He predicts that the petabytes of data being captured by government organizations such...
The Cultural is Political
Recently, Mike Innes tweeted playfully that he feared the Duck had become a "creative writing" blog due to the proliferation of satirical posts about pop cultural topics. This tweet was in response to my refutation of Brian Rathbun's (also satirical) assertion that nerd / metal-head subcultures in US society are mutually exclusive, a post which also included critiques of the genre-specificity of pop cultural research in IR, commentary on a...
China & Snyder’s “Myths of Empire” (2): Does China fit the Model?
<img alt="" galleryimg="no" onload="var downlevelDiv = document.getElementById('3dcce9dd-4b58-4b30-b4bd-c73424d74754'); downlevelDiv.innerHTML = "";" src="https://lh6.ggpht.com/-zkSxj4OoFuo/TzIEmBX7k6I/AAAAAAAAAEg/dbIfUwppypc/video77a247e1a0c0%25255B7%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" />I didn’t know the PLA likes Led Zeppelin… Here is part one, where I argued that China reasonably fits the prerequisites for...
Targeting…targeting: What are reasonable expectations?
Blue moon, you targeted me standing alone...Yesterday Charli wrote a post on whether or not those opposed to the use of drones should use the concept of “atrocity law” instead of “war crimes” or human rights violations.I wonder if others who generally oppose "targeted killings" think the concept of "atrocity law" might be a more useful way of framing this problem publicly than talking about "war crimes" or "human rights" specifically - concepts...
Whitney Houston, Chris Brown, and Grammy Irony
image taken from Jezebel.com This Sunday the 2012 Grammy Awards attracted more attention than normal due to the untimely passing of Whitney Houston on the eve of the awards show.During the Sunday night event, numerous artists dedicated their award to Houston or mentioned her amazing talents and the loss her death will mean to the industry.Interestingly, running counter to this somber dedication theme of the evening was a notable counter story:...
Blind Men, Elephants and Drones
There are many good reasons to read David Scheffer's All the Missing Souls: its insider story of the war crimes trials, written by one of their architects, the in-depth case studies on Bosnia, Rwanda, Cambodia, the impassioned defense of international justice as a moral idea. But the part I found most useful is in the post-script, where Scheffer re-articulates his theory that we need a new concept to describe the types of crimes dealt with by...
Begging to differ on Libya and R2P
In a reflective post not long ago, Robert E. Kelly noted:"...we are elated that the Libya operation worked, (against all odds given the Iraq experience and what we know about foreign intervention in LDCs generally). Lots of Duck writers supported the intervention. (I found Jon Western’s arguments last spring particularly persuasive; some of my writing on Libya is here and here.) Even if you didn’t support it, and worried that it meant more...
Quarter-Baked Idea: The Post-Cold War Concert System
This is the first in what may become an occasional series. Over the last year or two, I've drifted out of regular blogging. The usual excuses apply: too much work and not enough energy. I am so badly behind on a number of book chapters, manuscript revisions, and the like that the simple act of writing this explanation feels like a misuse of my time. Well, anyway, so my notion is this: write short posts designed to provoke discussion of various...
Friday Anti-Nerd Blogging: Downton Abbey Jumps the Shark
In a previous post, I puzzled about the popularity of Downton Abbey. It is (was?) a very well-done show, but no different, I thought at the time, than the standard PBS Masterpiece Theater that generally attracts very little viewership. One of the responses was that Downton was a soap opera dressed up as costume drama. I didn’t see it at the time. Downton seemed to hit all the usual British period piece points – the problem of the heir, the...