Via Robert Farley.The title of my twenty-third post was: "Nineteenth-Century Soft Power."The fifth sentence was part of a quotation from Anders Stephanson:Laggard by comparison, the United States nevertheless had enormous potential for emulation.Directions:1. Go into your archive.2. Find your 23rd post (or closest to).3. Find the fifth sentence (or closest to).4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.Passed...
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Crisis of Global Governance?
Professor John Ikenberry of American Abroad has written an excellent post on the "Crisis of Global Governance." After outlining a litany of recent institutional failings -- the unsuccessful efforts to reform and modernize the UN, the collapse of the EU constitutional process, and the weakening of various other institutions, rules and norms (including NATO, the NPT and WTO) -- Ikenberry asks: where are the vibrant and growing global and regional...
Knowledge politics
I'd like to think that the Duck's patron saint Max Weber would have been slightly apoplectic after reading this story in this morning's Washington Post about a new museum outside of Cincinnati dedicated to the promulgation of a "Young Earth Creationist" understanding of life, the universe, and everything: "It holds that the world and the universe are but 6,000 years old and that baby dinosaurs rode in Noah's Ark."This would be laughable --...
Mortara Center Blog
The Mortara Center for International Studies at Georgetown University, with which I will renew my affiliation when I return next year, has a weblog.So far there are three posts.The most recent is by Jeff Anderson, the Director of the BMW Center for German and European Studies. He provides a short post-mortem on the German elections and predicts that " neither Schroeder nor Merkel will succeed in becoming chancellor."There is also a debate...
The superiority of the middle course
I don't really understand the nature of the kerfuffle between the good folks at Lawyers, Guns and Money and Justin Gardner of I-can't-say-this-name-without-grimacing Donklephont. It does provide me, however, with an opportunity to quote the Duck's patron saint, Max Weber.The sociology of self-described "moderate" sites (as opposed to people who are simply moderates) on the blogoverse has always interested me (I have a few aborted posts on the...
Biology of conflict
Over at Coming Anarchy, Curzon links to an MA paper by the very well credentialed Steven Huybrechts ("Biology of Conflict: Ruling Out World Government"). Curzon writes,I adhere to a Kaplanesque version of pessimistic realism and fundamentally believe that human beings are hardwired to be violent. Steven Huybrechts agrees in his recent paper Biology of Conflict: Ruling Out World Government, arguing that people naturally divide into tribe-like...
Balancing and the balance of power, part 1
On Tuesday I posted a quotation from one of Peter Golden's articles on Central Asian steppe formations. The entry received some interesting commentary, but may have struck some of our readers - particularly those who don't know me - as a bit odd. How relevant can pre-Cinggisid steppe dynamics be to the more contemporary subject matter of international relations? Pretty relevant, actually. This is a first installment in a series of posts that...
Can you tell the players with a scorecard?
Have you noticed this very odd story (from CNN)?:The [Iraqi] official [speaking to CNN on the condition of anonymity] said two unknown gunmen in full Arabic dress began firing on civilians in central Basra, wounding several, including a traffic police officer. There were no fatalities, the official said.The two gunmen fled the scene but were captured and taken in for questioning, admitting they were British marines carrying out a "special...
Current Reading
I've updated my "current reading" on the sidebar, which had gotten horribly out of date. I'm particularly enjoying Bryan Ward-Perkin's The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, which was recommended to me by Vivek Sharma during a long discussion at APSA about the need to do more comparative-historical work in International Relations.Ward-Perkin's book is mostly a critique of certain trajectories of the "Late Antiquity" literature, which he...
Borders and Chaos
Those of us in IR who do "constructivist" work (broadly speaking) spend a fair amount of time questioning the notion that things like states are usefully treated as more or less solid objects. Instead of treating states as relatively unproblematic territorial containers with fixed and stable borders, we concern ourselves with processes of stabilization -- the various ways in which socially relevant distinctions are produced, inscribed, and...
Hip and Oh-So-Clever
I present... a quiz! In reverse-"SAT reading comprehension" format. Later, perhaps, someone will post on Germany's electoral mess, what may prove to be the shortest-lasting North Korean deal yet, China's courageous stance in favor of geno - er, sovereignty, or other aspects of international relations. Until then...In order to be a hip, fashionably "smart" literary twenty- or thirty-something, you must:(a) Continue to say the same sort of things...
Was effective opposition to the Iraq War impossible?
I've been meaning to blog about this for a bit.Ronald Krebs, in an exchange with Chaim Kauffman in International Security ("Selling the Market Short? The Marketplace of Ideas and the Iraq War," Vol. 29, No. 4, Spring 2005, pp. 196–207), argues that once the Bush Administration decided to go to war with Iraq, there was no way the opposition could win. Krebs' argument is related to a broader theory about what he and The Duck's own Patrick Jackson...