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...
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Criminalizing Medical Aid
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...
International Studies Association-Northeast Conference: One Week Left
Proposal for the conference are due 20 June 2011. Details here.
Friday Nerd Blogging
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...
Write less. Read more.
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...
Visualizing the Correlates of Global Issue Creation
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...
Targeting Targeted Killing
I was asked to step-in at the last minute to write a chapter on targeted killing for a textbook on isses in the War on Terror. Given the recent OBL killing and debate about raids, etc, I was surprisingly excited at the prospect of engaging with the issue. Although my chapter is almost done (no really, Richard, it’s on its way!) I’ve noticed some problems with researching the topic and trying to draw general conclusions as to whether or not it...
Feminist IR 101, Post #10, Feminist Scholarly Community
One of my favorite characterization of feminist theorizing is in Sarah Brown's 1988 Millennium article, where she calls feminist work "fundamentally a political act of commitment to understanding the world from a perspective of the socially subjugated" (p.472). From this and other reading in feminist theory and praxis, I've always seen feminism as not just an intellectual interest in gender as a force in global politics, but also as a politics...
The Rhino in the Room
Somehow I managed to delete my mediocre post on peer review. The gist: peer review is arbitrary and capricious; summary rejections offer a cosmetic fix; we need to reduce our reliance on counting peer-review journal articles as a basis for evaluating scholarly worth.Jarrod Hayes commented: I am struck by the arbitrariness of peer-review. I have at least once asked to come in as a reviewer when two reviews reached polar opposite conclusions...
Unpacking the Anti-Drone Debate
My student Lina Shaikhouni and I have a new Foreign Policy piece in which we make "The Case Against the Case Against Drones," to paraphrase Stephanie. Therein, we argue that although there are many good reasons why drones shouldn't be used as they are being used, or where they are being used, the arguments against drones per se are often based on misconceptions or assumptions for which we don't have good data. In particular, we point out: 1)...
Crisis and Change in International Organizations
The ongoing saga over the leadership crisis at the IMF poses a bigger existential question about crisis and change in international organizations: do crises in fact provoke change? This was the question at the forefront of my mind as I was driving from Texas to DC last week to start teaching a summer graduate seminar for the LBJ School of Public Affairs on, of all things, Crisis and Change in International Organizations. I was struck by the...
Goldstein: The World Has Never Been More Peaceful
Joshua Goldstein has a must-read book in press entitled Winning the War on War. I've seen the advance version and like many things about it, not least of which is the easy-reading style pitched at an informed lay audience, the way he begins with a thought experiment rather than with a bunch of statistics, then draws the reader through available scholarly research in an entertaining way to develop his argument. The thought experiment: imagine...