by Brian Rathbun | 17 Jun 2011 |
Just yesterday I cautioned a graduate student not to get on the wrong side of some powerful people for the sake of principle if he could not truly effect change. And yet here I sit typing this right now, about to begin a rant on David Lake's new ISQ article: "Why ''isms' are evil: Theory, Epistemology, and Academic Sects as Impediments to Understanding and Progress." Nexon started it. It is his fault.The piece is taken from David Lake's keynote...
by Charli Carpenter | 17 Jun 2011 |
Part of the research project that is keeping me too busy to blog involves capturing, coding and visualizing the issue agenda for various transnational networks. Here is a visualization of the core human rights network on the World Wide Web, circa 2008.* (Nodes represent organizational websites and ties represent hyperlinks between them. Node size corresponds to in-degree centrality within the network.)You can click for a larger view.It looks to...
by Dan Nexon | 16 Jun 2011 |
Dave Noon Erik Loomis relates two anecdotes about the workings of US power. Both are a bit extreme. The US-Haiti relationship, in particular, is about as unequal as you can get in contemporary world politics. Still, Loomis' stories illustrate why some of us leave short-term stints in government with the impression that Washington is both much more powerful and much weaker than US academics often assume.US officials find themselves significantly...
by Dan Nexon | 15 Jun 2011 |
I'm currently working on a few difference pieces that deal with the relationship between liberalism and empire. I also, as long-team readers of the Duck know, consider neoconservative understandings of international politics as a variant of liberalism that constitutes a specific flavor of the US commitment to democratic enlargement as transformative of international politics. Neoconservatives reject the idea that international institutions, at...
by Megan MacKenzie | 15 Jun 2011 |
Did you know Canada has a truth and reconciliation commission operating right now? It seems neither do most Canadians. The Canadian TRC was initiated to address the history and legacies of the former residential school system for Canada’s indigenous population, or First Nations. First Nations children were taken from their homes- siblings often separated- and placed into residential schools, which operated from 1870 until 1993. These children...
by Brian Rathbun | 14 Jun 2011 |
So I have finally caught up on all the back episodes of Game of Thrones, so I know what the hell you are all talking about. I thought I'd take up Charli's challenge about the paradigm that Dead Ned represents because I think that it says something deeper (always deeper) about something missing in IR theory these days.Ned represents duty, honor and integrity as opposed to old school Machiavellianism (although I guess duty, honor and integrity...
by Kate Weaver | 14 Jun 2011 |
Being new to the blogging world, I have been thinking a lot about the utility and influence of blogs. Blogs seem appealing in so many ways. They appear to be an effective means of disseminating facts and views quickly to a wide audience, facilitating timely responses to emerging policy issues (and other fun pop politics). At the same time, blogging is a way of discussing real intellectual ideas free of many of the pitfalls of peer review and...
by Dan Nexon | 14 Jun 2011 |
The crackdown in Bahrain hasn't received as much attention as those elsewhere in the Arab world. In part, that's because what's happening in Syria and Libya are more spectacular. In part that's because Bahrain doesn't have many enemies among western regimes. Still, the regime smashed down an iron fist, one that hit the Shia community particularly hard. Although the government has officially lifted marital law, it continues to stifle political...
by Dan Nexon | 13 Jun 2011 |
Proposal for the conference are due 20 June 2011. Details here.
by Charli Carpenter | 10 Jun 2011 |
And so on.* H/T WinterisComingBitch. Scott Meslow ponders the human security implications of Ned's choices. *Oh, the pedagogical possibilities! Does Ned Stark represent constructivism? Or does he represent the mocking realist riposte to constructivists as naive fools? Or only a mockery of that riposte? (For readers not yet following Game of Thrones on HBO, this. For viewers who wish more depth on the Starks, this. To those viewers who've also...
by Brian Rathbun | 10 Jun 2011 |
I thought I would offer my take on the series of posts below on how to reform the peer-review system. Part of the problem is bad reviews. We can remove the anonymity of them, but that raises the obvious problems (bad blood, retaliation, pulling punches, speaking truth to power, etc). A better solution would be to rely on the expertise of editors. A really stupid review is obvious to even non-experts. And if one reviewer says X and the other...
by Charli Carpenter | 9 Jun 2011 |
My big work-related task this month is to pull together my focus group findings into something approximating a theoretically relevant conference paper. I like to start with visualizations.This chart is derived from a code scheme we developed to categorize human security practitioners' responses in focus groups to the question: what factors facilitate or inhibit the emergence of new issues on global policy agenda? Answers fell into five broad...