A few years ago, a mid-career biochemist enrolled in my master's level international relations course because he was burned out of working in academic and commercial settings in his field. He wanted to apply his background in biological sciences to his new interest in security politics. The 2001 anthrax attacks, in particular, had influenced his thinking.Phil McCauley turned out to be a very bright and capable student and we soon figured out a...
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More ISA Redux: Diversity Issues in the International Studies Association
A debate about the mission of the ISA Diversity Committee that started Tuesday at the Governing Council weekend and continued throughout the conference has inspired me to think about diversity issues in the International Studies Association and in a number of our other professional environments. While I will inevitably mischaracterize the contours of this debate - I'll try to describe it quickly as a prelude to what I want to say about these...
Peace Talks and Terror Tactics
Video Source: Channel 4 (UK)One day after peace talks between India and Pakistan, there has been an attack targeting Indian nationals on a goodwill mission in Afghanistan. I don't think anyone seriously doubts that these Taliban-led attacks in Afghanistan are being directed from Pakistani soil. (In general, the Afghan and Indian people have quite warm relations and Afghan nationalists have gravitated toward seeking a strategic partnership with...
Explaining, broadly understood
So Charli -- who did, in fact, attend our ISA Battlestar Galactica panel in costume -- has posted elsewhere about the panel. Though she calls it the "best event [she] attended at ISA this year," she does express some disappointment about the content of the panel when compared with the panel's title:Unfortunately the panel turned out to be misnamed however, for none of the papers really spoke to the question of whether BSG has an impact on...
Sudan’s Truce: A turning point or a simple pause?
Last weekend's signing of the truce between Omar al-Bashir's government and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) rebels in Darfur is a good first step. The government will commute the death sentences of some of the JEM rebels and will release several others. The JEM will hold to a truce and the two sides will resume more comprehensive negotiations in March. However, the problem is, as Laura Heaton from Enough Project notes, this is...
Wilson’s legacy
Duck readers may recall that just over two years ago Charli posted about an interesting and provocative Deborah Boucoyannis article arguing that realist notions of the balance-of-power are actually liberal ideas about checks-and-balances. The post generated a lot of comments (which apparently cannot be linked under the new software), including a fairly long and somewhat critical one from Duck founder Dan Nexon. Despite the flaws he noted, Dan...
More late post-ISA thoughts
I, like Laura, am a bit slow off the take regarding post-ISA blogging. In my defence I have a 6-hour jet-lag that was aggravated by United Airlines being successful in severely messing up every single segment of my flight to New Orleans and back. (The friendly skies? More like the unfriendly kick in the... oh forget it.)Certainly one of the highlights for me was the panel (already discussed here, here , here and here) on international...
ISA — Katrina’s Legacy
I'll have more to say about the ISA conference in a few upcoming posts, but let me begin with some comments on the host city. ISA was held in New Orleans, in part, to provide a lift for the city after Hurricane Katrina five years ago. Somewhere around 5,000 folks descended on the city with cash in hand to help the local economy. The conference started the day after Mardi Gras and came less than two weeks after the Saints' Super Bowl victory. A...
Gender and Security: Theory and Practice
My post-ISA blogging is slower than it otherwise would have been, due to an unfortunate interlude with food poisoning. But I figured I'd start with the "working group" that Jennifer Lobasz and I ran at ISA, called "Gender and Security: Theory and Practice," which Charli mentioned in her previous post. A Working Group at ISA meets on the day before the conference, and then twice during the conference, and members are asked to attend common...
More ISA highlights
I spent a fair amount of time at ISA attending panels and very little sitting in the NOLA bars. Perhaps I wasn't fully engaged in the "business of conferencing," though we'd all probably agree that "ISA is what we make of it." So, what did I make of ISA 2010 (beyond what I wrote Saturday)?Over several delicious dinners through the week, I learned that Abita Amber is over-carbonated. This Duck recommends ordering the Turbodog. The next time ISA...
The Transmogrification of Scholarly Discourse: More Insights from ISA
Does a video blog post satirizing a scholarly debate count as a contribution to that debate? This is the question I meant to pose when I chose to preface my remarks with a YouTube clip about academic bloggers on the ISA panel entitled “Do International Relations Blogs Inform Practice? Theory? Both? Neither?” Naturally, the equipment failed. So it wasn’t until Q&A when I had a chance to hit “play” – and then only in the context of a question...
Thinking About Gender and Security Studies at ISA
Among events I attended last week at the International Studies Association Annual Conference: an informal discussion on the relationship between IR feminist theory and security studies, organized by fellow Duck Laura Sjoberg. Some of the questions posed to the participants in advance: What (if anything) can feminist theory teach security studies? What (if anything) can security studies teach IR feminism? My key answer to the first of these...