by Bill Petti | 30 May 2005 |
Patrick's post regarding yesterday's "Non" vote in France brings up an interesting point, one that is often missing from discussions of European integration in the MSM (mainstream media)--the importance of identity for political outcomes. Patrick argues that the vote yesterday was not driven by economic interests per se, but rather the successful framing of the issue by right and left groups as one of "us" (France) vs. "them" (other...
by Dan Nexon | 30 May 2005 | Featured
A big "hello!" (or should that be a "quack"?) to those of you dropping by via Crooked Timber. We've only been doing this for a few days, so any comments or suggestions are very much appreciated.Feel free to come back from time to time. The owl may fly at twilight, but the Duck's usually around.If anyone knows how to get blogger to make these tags conditional, please let me know!
by Patrick Thaddeus Jackson | 30 May 2005 |
French voters rejected the European Constitution yesterday in a referendum by a pretty decisive margin: 55% opposed, 45% in favor. Pollsters had been predicting this outcome for a while, so the returns came as no surprise; now begins the tussle over why the constitution was rejected. The New York Times [free subscription required] attributed the result to economic issues:The debate had been colored by fear of the mythical "Polish plumber," the...
by Dan Nexon | 29 May 2005 |
Some time ago I joined an evolutionary-psychology listserv. Some international-relations scholars have started to draw on evolutionary psychology, and I thought reading the listserv might be one way of educating myself about the subfield. It turns out that a lot of the traffic involves posting articles that are related to evolutionary psychology in one way or another. Today. someone posted "Study: Homophobia hard wired by evolution" from...
by Patrick Thaddeus Jackson | 29 May 2005 | Featured
Because you, the readers, want to know -- or at least because we, the writers, think that you, the readers, want to know. (I'm fascinated by the fact that a name and a personal biography improve the credibility of a piece of writing; there's something very interesting there about the way that we as a society assign responsibility and blame -- but I digress.)I'm an Assistant Professor of International Relations in the School of International...
by Bill Petti | 29 May 2005 |
Dan's post on the recent collapse of the NPT conference raises some interesting points. The recent negotiations, as well as the continuing stand-off between Iran, North Korea, and the US, leads to some very interesting questions regarding motivations, blame, and policy. I have been blogging about this issue as it pertains to Iran and North Korea over the past week, so some of this post will be based on my discussion there. Additionally, I will...
by Bill Petti | 28 May 2005 | Featured
Hello all. As promised, here is my intro post. I will keep it short.I am a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania in the Political Science department. As far as subfields go I am mostly interested in International Relations Theory and Security--however, I find it increasingly difficult (not to mention undesirable) to analyze such phenomena without incorporating concepts from Comparative Politics. Like Dan, I have a webpage but...
by Dan Nexon | 28 May 2005 |
"Store Wars", the pro-organic food Star Wars parody, gets 1,268 hits on Technorati. The infinitely superior, but much older, "Troops" receives only 43.1I remember when my wife brought home "Troops" on zip disk from her job at an internet startup. We were living in New York, in a tiny apartment, and I weighed a lot less than I do now. Anyway, we still have the disk lying around somewhere, although internet technology and the lack of a zip drive...
by Patrick Thaddeus Jackson | 28 May 2005 |
As a baseball fan, I watch a fair number of games during the regular season, most of them on television (ballpark prices, even for the cheap seats, prohibit more than about one family outing a month to see a game live). A lot of the commentary by the sportscasters is silly, although the anecdotes told by former players and the locker room gossip that reporters have managed to pick up are sometimes interesting. But the analysis of what is going...
by Dan Nexon | 28 May 2005 |
The collapse of the most recent NPT conference is already gone from the headlines. The general tenor of the reporting has gone, more or less, like this:When the conference began on May 2, countries had hoped to agree on a plan to plug loopholes in the treaty that enable countries to acquire sensitive atomic technology and to hear from Washington and the four other NPT members with nuclear weapons that they remained committed to disarming.But it...
by Dan Nexon | 28 May 2005 |
There were two sets of very interesting comments on my recent post on hegemony. Bill Petti questions whether US hegemony only has another few decades left in its lifespan. At the most basic level, Bill is right. I definitely overstated the case. At the same time, Bill presents far too optimistic a picture of the prospects for medium-term American primacy.Bill argues that hegemonic decline is driven by one of four processes: "imperial...
by Dan Nexon | 28 May 2005 | Featured
The Duck of Minerva is now a collaborative endeavor. Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, an assistant professor at American University, and William Petti, a doctoral student in international relations at the University of Pennsylvania, have agreed to join the staff.They will be introducing themselves shortly.