Anwar Gargash, a diplomatic advisor to the UAE, recently spoke to an international conference on the UAE's desire to smooth over tensions with Turkey and Iran. Turkey and the UAE found themselves on opposite sides of the Arab Spring, with the former supporting revolutionary movements around the Middle East and the latter trying to frustrate them. And the UAE shares Saudi concerns about Iran's influence. This may be, as Trita Parsi recently...
Matt Hancock, a Conservative MP and the UK’s Health Secretary during most of the Covid lockdowns, has failed upwards.
“Kuzushi” is the concept of off-balancing. It refers to a tactic of getting your opponent out of a fixed position where he’ll be vulnerable, maybe getting his weight tilted too much to one side or making him overcommit to a move. With kuzushi, you aren’t achieving anything; you’re opening up a window of opportunity. Window ajar, you have a split second to advance your position. A sweep or submission attempt that would’ve been impossible under normal conditions suddenly works against an unbalanced opponent.
If you’ve written a guest post for the Duck of Minerva recently, or published a piece at International Studies Quarterly while I was editor, you know that I really hate “heavy noun phrases.” Scholars seem to really like using them. I don’t know why. Perhaps they think it makes their writing sound more sophisticated. There’s an article at PS which is good at diagnosing the problem (but offers bad fixes).
The way that APSA leaders handled the Claremont Institute situation was troubling… will APSA, as an organization, be committed to some broadly liberal democratic values?
In this installment of “Whiskey Optional,” Stacie Goddard (Wellesley), Evelyn Goh (Australian Nat…
Corruption is an issue largely off the radar screens of many IR scholars. How can they better theorize corruption’s pervasiveness in international politics, while avoiding the biases of past approaches?
Professor Harman joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast. She starts off discussing with Brent her childhood and growing up on a farm in Buckinghamshire in SE England, her interests and aspirations during that time and the family dynamics regarding politics and who was expected to take over the farm each generation. She had a gap year, then went to Manchester for undergrad and graduate training, got into global public health, political economy, and...
Divorces don’t usually send shockwaves through the global policy field. They almost never create uncertainty about the health of hundreds of millions of people. The split between Bill and Melinda Gates is doing both. It affects the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has an endowment worth almost $52 billion. In 2019, the foundation disbursed roughly $6 billion in aid and grants. About thereof of was spent on health in...
So the New York Times reported on Beverly Gage, a history professor at Yale University, resigning from her post as head of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy because of donor pressure. There's a lot at stake in this. As an academic field, grand strategy has a reputation for being very conservative, and for advocating a didactic, great-man view of history. The Yale program has not only been the premier school for grand strategy,...
Academic freedom is a very important value. Professional integrity is another. Both values admit complexity, and are the subject of reasonable disagreement among colleagues and leaders of academic institutions. At the same time, the modern academy would not be what it is, or at least aspires to be, were it not for these values. A very wide range of behaviors are consistent with and protected by these values. But for these values to have...
Jeffrey C. Isaac served as Editor-in-Chief of Perspectives on Politics: A Political Science Public Sphere, a flagship journal of APSA, for eight years. During this time (2009-2017), he also served as an ex-officio member of the APSA Governing Council. In 2017, he was awarded APSA’s Frank J. Goodnow Award for his contributions to the public engagement of the political science discipline.