The role of insults -- and the corrolary role of honor -- in world politics represents an odd topic in international-relations scholarship. Everyone knows insults and honor matter a great deal. Some scholars write about them -- or, at least, related topics like "prestige" -- but no one seems to be able to get a convincing handle on how they work, how they matter, and so forth. One of the few pieces I've seen on the topic that I found plausible...

I've been catching up on the Daily Show recently. One recent episode featured Michael Mandelbaum plugging his new book, The Case For Goliath: How America Acts As The World's Government in the Twenty-first Century. Best line of the interview? John Stewart's statement that American hegemony involves "all the burdens of empire -- but without the slaves" (note to self: must work this into an article somehow).I haven't read Mandelbaum's book yet,...

One of my former graduate students, Igor Danchenko, is in the news for uncovering Vladimir Putin's plagiarized dissertation. This is from the Chronicle of Higher Education, March 26: Two scholars at a research institution in Washington have accused Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, of plagiarizing a management textbook by two professors at the University of Pittsburgh in a dissertation for which he received an economics degree, The Washington...

Nidal al-Mughrabi of Reuters writes:Hamas called on Monday for talks with Western powers to seek a "just peace" in the Middle East but showed no sign of softening its stance on Israel as it presented its government to the Palestinian parliament.Hamas's prime minister-designate, Ismail Haniyeh, told the assembly that his cabinet, expected to win a vote of confidence and take office by mid-week, was ready to open a dialogue with the "Quartet" of...

Georgetown overcomes my temporary defection to Ohio State University and emerges triumphant in a lopsided victory. Clearly, the basketball team did not, much to my dismay, miss my tremendous personal contribution to their efforts.Filed as: Georgetown, Hoyas, and march madness

Marc Schulman wants his regular readers to publicize one of his recent posts, in which he reflects on French philosopher André Glucksmann's recent article in Democratiya, "Separating Truth and Belief." It is an interesting read. Marc emphasizes a particular passage:Civilised discourse analyses and defines scientific truths, historic truths and matters of fact relating to knowledge, not to faith. And it does this irrespective of race or...

Two polls on the motion to censure Bush show very different results. Yesterday an ARG poll found Americans favor censure for the President by a 46-44% margin, i.e., a statistical tie. Today, Rasmussen found Americans oppose censure by 38-45%. Seems like a big swing for a single day, eh? Perhaps one of the polls is screwy? After all, ARG and Rasmussen use different methodologies.There are number of plausible reasons for the apparently steep...

If Barry Bonds had never taken steroids, never broken the single-season HR record, and never moved himself into baseball's holy trinity of HR hitters (i.e. Aaron, Ruth, and Mays), he still would have been a first-ballot Hall of Famer. In addition to his 8 gold gloves and 3 MVPs (pre-juice) he would have finished among the all time leaders in a number of prominent offensive categories. But what has been lost due to the hysteria over Bonds the...

The new 2006 National Security Strategy is out. Bill has been anticipating this since early January. CSM has a March 17 story ...with some remarks by John Mearsheimer."It's not an especially hawkish document," says Professor Mearsheimer. "It makes arguments about using force that most security experts - left or right - would agree with. It goes out of its way to say that using force would be a last resort."Ivo Daalder of Brookings says that the...

Over at Donklephont, Michael Reynolds tackles foreign policy through his lens of self-proclaimed centrism. In doing so, he makes some important errors. The first, and less obvious, is that he conflates broader approaches to foreign policy with specific ideological positions within the American political tradition. Thus, he treats realism as co-equal with what he takes to be (a) contemporary American liberal outlooks on foreign policy, (b)...

During one IR seminar in grad school (this would have been about 1985), George Quester pointed out on several occasions that a good book could be written comparing international relations and mobsters. Has anyone done that in the past two decades?Maybe the point is too obvious. It certainly would not be especially controversial to realists like John Mearsheimer:For Realists, all states are basically black boxes that behave the same way. If the...

Rodger is certainly right that posting has been light due to grading. However, in my case the combination of spring break and massive amounts of grading offered me the opportunity to watch the World Baseball Classic the past two days. And while I admit that I was somewhat skeptical of the whole enterprise when it was announced (Rob still has some issues with the WBC), the past two days of games that I was able to watch (and the highlights of...