by Charli Carpenter | 20 Apr 2008 |
This weekend I discovered Facebook’s “Which Dictator Are You?” application. This is a seven-question quiz that spits out a result with some basic historical information on a dictator and some cheeky comments about how the application inferred a match from your answers.I have some unanswered questions about how the quiz works and some preliminary thoughts on how history is being communicated through such a device.1) First item of note is the...
by Charli Carpenter | 18 Apr 2008 |
A while ago there was some discussion on this blog about the definition of "celebrity" activism for the purposes of empirically studying the entertainment industry's role in advocacy campaigns. A question was raised about what constitutes celebrity status, what constitutes activism, how much the two co-constitute one another in these cases.Jeff Skoll weighed in on this last week in his comments at the Global Philanthropy Forum 2008 Annual...
by Dan Nexon | 17 Apr 2008 |
Charles Tilly has won the 2008 Albert O. Hirschman Prize.From the announcement:“Charles Tilly is one of the most distinguished of all contemporary social scientists,” said Craig Calhoun, president of the SSRC. “He is the most influential analyst of social movements and contentious politics, a pathbreaker in the historical sociology of the state, a pivotal theorist of social inequality. Among the most eminent of sociologists, he is also a...
by Charli Carpenter | 17 Apr 2008 |
An unusually empirical op-ed in the New York Times today tests Obama's hypothesis that "wedge issues take prominence" when voters are frustrated by "difficult times." Larry Bartels uses polling data to demonstrate that in fact, more small-town working class voters believe the government can be trusted than urban voters making more that $60,000 a year, and the small town working class is also least likely to vote on social issues. David Park...
by Charli Carpenter | 12 Apr 2008 |
Some commenters on my recent post about emotions in IR are a little flustered over the difference between Klingons and Vulcans in Star Trek. Representative David Wu of Oregon offers a clarification from the floor of Congress:
by Rodger Payne | 11 Apr 2008 |
Recently, my graduate IR seminar addressed critical theory -- and we naturally contrasted critical theory to "problem-solving theory," as Robert Cox would have it.In a volume about Cox's contributions to IR, Timothy Sinclair draws the distinction (pp. 5-6): It is the action, not the limits of the system, that is the analytic focus of of problem solving. Critical theory steps outside the confines of the existing set of relationships to identify...
by Dan Nexon | 11 Apr 2008 |
Daniel Little has a wonderful project instantiated in his website "UnderstandingSociety ChangingSociety" aimed at providing resources for those interested in social processes and social change. He's collected a number of interviews with prominent figures. I've watched the one with Charles Tilly, which is really a remarkable interview with a remarkable scholar and intellectual. I highly recommend that readers of the Duck take a look,...
by Dan Nexon | 10 Apr 2008 |
Matthew Yglesias calls our attention to Todd Gitlin's quick summary of Robert Kagan's book excerpt in The New Republic. Kagan's book is prefigured in his same-titled Policy Review essay, "End of Dreams, Return of History," which I blogged about some time ago.Matt points out the most important point: if we treat what might be called "the great game, but now with new globalization sauce" as a titanic struggle between liberal democracy and "new...
by Charli Carpenter | 10 Apr 2008 |
Could be my lack of expertise in Chinese diplomatic discourse, but I've found myself doing double-takes at the frequency with which Chinese elites have referred to "feelings" in statements to the Western media lately. Take Gao Xiqing's interview on 60 Minutes Sunday. Pressed by Leslie Stahl on whether the Chinese should submit to an official code of conduct for sovereign wealth funds, he responds: "Why do you need a law like that? That law will...
by Peter | 10 Apr 2008 |
"With this administration, if a passenger blows up a plane, it's a failure in the war on terror. But if the plane just blows up on its own — eh, it's the market self-regulating."Click here to stream the full bit.I watched this on my DVR and thought, gee, I ought to post it. But Kevin Drum beat me too it, hat tip to him.
by Charli Carpenter | 9 Apr 2008 |
I have found an interesting counter-example to my earlier lament about disciplinary norms restricting open reflection by IR scholars about their personal trajectory and history as it relates to their work. It is Robert Keohane's recent interview on UC-Berkeley's "Conversations with History" series in which he expounds the myriad personal, cultural, social influences that have informed and shaped his research.Keohane's willingness to expound on...
by Peter | 7 Apr 2008 |
Stanley Fish uses a review of the forthcoming book “French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States” (University of Minnesota Press) to provide (what I think is a) very good summary of the debates and issues raised by what we in IR have come to call the Linguistic Turn in epistemology and resulting IR theory. This morning I was teaching discourse analysis in my Intro to Research...