Chinese President Hu Jintao is in town to meet with our own commander-in-chief and while I am sure most people are focusing on the more visible issues of trade, currency valuation, and nuclear proliferation I like to look at the apparently insignificant, yet likely-to-cause-diplomatic-hay types of moments.FP Passport reports that while introducing the Chinese national anthem during the arrival ceremony on the South Lawn this morning, the...

The Atlantic Monthly recently asked a group of foreign policy "insiders" a number of questions about US foreign policy. The poll results were in the April 2006 issue, which is hidden behind a subscriber wall. The magazine greatly limited the possible poll answers. For example, the insiders were given a list of seven countries and asked to rank which would post the greatest threats to US security in the next decade. The outcome was perhaps...

Thanks to Dan, I read the interesting AU piece about Patrick. This is what caught my eye:“We wouldn’t have a car culture if it weren’t for superhighways,” he says. “The whole idea of being able to drive a car depends on the existence of a certain set of infrastructures. Material infrastructures, certainly, but also conceptual. Think about the metaphors we use. Someone who’s in control is in the driver’s seat. There’s something significant about...

Back in 1976, the eminent political scientist Robert Dahl pointed out a common error in the analysis of power among social theorists: the tendency to assume that power was a unit-level attribute, something that a unit or actor possessed in isolation. This was hardly a new observation, but Dahl did something very important with it: he coined a term to describe the problem. Dahl called it the "lump-of-power fallacy." But despite the efforts of...

Check it out as American University promotes our very own Patrick Jackson. For example:It was Jackson’s dedication toward students that brought him to AU. Attracted by the school’s emphasis on instruction and the opportunity to teach a course on his beloved science fiction (as it relates to world politics), Jackson moved to Washington in 2000 from his adopted hometown of New York, where he earned a PhD from Columbia University and developed an...

The Chronicle reports on a rather old problem in the electronic peer-review process: editors, authors, and reviewers forwarding Word documents without scrubbing the properties, tracked changes, and other sources of embedded data likely to reveal a writer's or reviewer's identity. Henry Farrell weighs in: "I’ve been aware of this for a couple of years (I carefully strip all data before sending reviews out, just in case) – but I suspect that many...

During the late 1980s and the 1990s academic international relations was dominated by the so-called "paradigm wars." Scholars argued over -- and oriented their writings towards -- the major three "isms": realism, liberalism, and constructivism.[1]The degree to which arguments about the "isms" enframe and motivate many articles and books in international-relations scholarship creates one of the biggest barriers to entry for students,...

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