Timothy Peterson and Leah Graham recently published a study in the Journal of Conflict Resolution showing that, after you control for the democratic peace, similarities in human rights performance have an important effect on any two countries' likelihood to go to war. The interesting caveat is that this finding holds true for states that abuse their citizens as well as those that don't:Although mutual norms of domestic non-violence are more...
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In Defense of Particularism in American Foreign policy
[This is a cross-posting from Dart-Throwing Chimp.] I've just finished reading John Lewis Gaddis's terrific biography of George Frost Kennan, a towering figure in American foreign policy after World War II whom Henry Kissinger described as "one of the most important, complex, moving, challenging and exasperating American public servants." Apart from recommending to the book, which I do without hesitation to anyone with an interest in world...
Labels and tribes
In the Matrix, it's trivial to specify the underlyingdata-generating process. It involves kung fu. Given PTJ's post, I wanted to clarify two points from my original post on Big Data and the ensuing comment thread.I use quantitative methods in my own work. I've invested a lot of time and a lot of money in learning statistics. I like statistics! I think that the development of statistical techniques for specifying and disciplining our analytic...
Experiments, Social Science, and Politics
[This post was written by PTJ]One of the slightly disconcerting experiences from my week in Vienna teaching an intensive philosophy of science course for the European Consortium on Political Research involved coming out of the bubble of dialogues with Wittgenstein, Popper, Searle, Weber, etc. into the unfortunate everyday actuality of contemporary social-scientific practices of inquiry. In the philosophical literature, an appreciably and...
Even Uncle Ho’s Hand-Weights Contributed to the Revolution (1)
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...
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:...