'Tis the season to be a neurotic mess - if you're late-stage ABD or newly minted PhD.Between, on the one hand, emails from students and friends and, on the other, trolling around anonymous academic blogs, I have reached the inescapable conclusion that it is, indeed, the time of darkness and pain known as "the academic job market."So, in the spirit of Daniel Drezner's advice columns for graduate students, let me share my own words of wisdom...
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Was the policy fixed around Iraq?
I've been reading the International Security forum on "soft balancing." I'll have more to write about it when I finish my next installment of "Balancing and the balance of power." My initial reaction is that the "soft balancing" arguments, at least as presented by Robert Pape and T.V. Paul, are not very persuasive.But both of the articles raise an orthogonal question, one that has been troubling me for a while. Both Pape and Paul spend a great...
Yankee Go Home!
Mansur Mirovalev of the AP reports:TASHKENT, Uzbekistan - A senior State Department official said Tuesday the president of Uzbekistan made it clear that American forces must leave their air base in the Central Asian country, and the U.S. intends to do so "without further discussion."The demand came as relations soured following U.S. criticism of Uzbekistan's crackdown on anti-government protesters in May in the eastern city of Andijan.Regular...
Realism and constructivism
A while back, Marc Lynch threw down the gauntlet and declared the last decade of international politics a vindication for the constructivist approach to international relations.Warning: what follows is a very long post, one that will be primarily of interest to people who care about academic International Relations (IR)Marc wrote:Back in the 1990s, the International Relations subfield of Political Science was consumed by the so-called...
Latest meme
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...
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...