I have the suspicion that my fan base might be the choir, and I want to be sure I play it down the middle. I am sure that Duck readers are the kind of folks who can laugh at themselves.European political scientists like post-positivism, also known as post-structuralism or post-modernism. Or at least non-European political scientists think those things are all the same. No one really knows. No North American political scientist has ever met a...
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Will the IRA blow up Will and Kate?
Unidentified ‘British security officials’ are telling journalists there is a possibility that sections of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) could attack next Friday’s royal wedding in London. At an event I attended this week, Patrick Mercer OBE, Conservative MP for Newark and member of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Transatlantic and International Security, warned that the three security threats facing Britain are Al-Qaeda inspired...
Does the Arab Spring show how strategic narratives work?
Nobody has come close to explaining how strategic narratives work in international relations, despite the term being banded about. Monroe Price wrote a great article in the Huffington Post yesterday that moves the debate forward. As I have already written, strategic narratives are state-led projections of a sequence of events and identities, a tool through which political leaders try to give meaning to past, present and future in a way that...
India: Choosing between America and Iran
India appears to be continuing to shift its West Asia policy away from a once budding partnership with Iran, which aimed among other things to stabilize Afghanistan. It is rumored that in late March, the Indian National Security Adviser, Shiv Shanker Menon, delicately delivered a message to the Islamic Republic that India's PM would not be making a state visit later this year (Telegraph [Kolkata] 3/10/11). If the news reports are correct, the...
Russian political humor is back
Vadim Nikitin has an excellent run down. With a possible Putin - Medvedev face-off looming for next year's presidential elections, the campaign season has already begun. This trailer shows how it all might go down in 2012 and was featured on, of all places, the Russian Communist Party's website. The clip ends with "There's always an alternative: Communist Party of Russia."Nikitin has translated the key points as they appear in the clip: ANCIENT...
A teachable moment: “provoked by rebels”
In my seminar at Amherst College today, my students discussed the status of their final research papers, their research designs, and the use of sources. One student asked what were the rules for using quotes or pulling block text from other sources. Since so many folks seem to be reading Alan Kuperman's stuff these days, I showed my students the Kuperman article that Patrick linked yesterday in which Kuperman argues the case of moral hazard in...
Boys’ Toys
The following word cloud from Crystal Smith's The Achilles Effect blog reflects the vocabulary commonly used for toy advertisements directed toward young boys (i.e. those toys in the 6-8 year old boy's section of the Toys 'R Us website were classified as "boys' toys"). While the data visualization was not meant as part of a rigorous study, it is nevertheless interesting anecdotal evidence pointing toward the ways in which gender stereotypes are...
Stuff Political Scientists Like #2 — The Strategic Logic of…. well, Everything
Before I begin, I should thank those who have offered encouragement to continue the series and note, to those few who have not, that this is satire. Like all satire, it is an exaggeration of things that nevertheless have a kernel of truth. I myself am guilty of some of these things, like collecting original data. It is not an indictment of the field of political science, only a send-up of its pretensions. OK, here we go.Political scientists...
Libya and the Threshold for War
Some questions about Libya.To clear the decks, I'm instinctively uneasy with international interventions in civil wars, given the historical difficulties of keeping such interventions limited and the unintended consequences and moral hazards of such undertakings. Not to mention the burdens that states like the US and UK are now shouldering, with the constraints and pressures on our statecraft after Iraq and with Afghanistan, the global...
Introducing myself
Hello, readers of the Duck!Dan Nexon has very kindly invited me to do some guest blogging at this site.Introducing myself in brief: I'm an Australian academic with an over-fondness for cigars. Working at King's College London at the Defence Academy, as a Senior Lecturer in Defence Studies. In September I'll be moving to Reading to take up a Readership in Strategic Studies.My main interest these days is in the history and theory of US grand...
Political Geography Lesson 101
In my American Foreign Policy class, I typically try to find some time to engage students about Puerto Rico. After all, most of them never have cause to think about Puerto Rico's quasi-colonial status in the US geostrategic orbit. Some Puerto Rican nationalists seek freedom from US domination, but even progressive activist American students interested in global affairs tend to overlook the plight of Puerto Rico in favor of other...
Un-Civil Military Relations
Starbuck's away and has various guest bloggers filling in at Wings Over Iraq. David Costelloe of Never Felt Better is among them, and his latest post is one more for my dataset on BSG analogies in Egypt commentary. In particular Costelloe argues Egypt can learn from the flaws in Colonel Saul Tigh's character and the absence of civilian supremacy it represents: Let’s break it down. He shows hesitance when handed some responsibility during a...