Warning! According to the law that the Russian parliament passed yesterday, this post might need to be prefaced with a disclaimer that the following text has been compiled by a foreign agent. An individual can be labeled as a “foreign agent” in Russia if they (1) distribute information, and (2) receive funds from sources outside Russia. I am ticking both boxes here, even as an academic working at a university, and the law intentionally left the...
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Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Policy Engagement* (*But Were Too Afraid to Ask)
Earlier this year, our team at the Sié Center at the University of Denver announced our program on the three R’s of Academic-Policy Engagement (or R3, if you prefer): Rigor, Relevance, and Responsibility. Generously supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, our program is intended to both study and help train early-career scholars around the ethical issues that arise when academics—who face ever-increasing pressures to...
IR, it’s time to talk about what the “multiple comparisons issue” really is
As a reviewer and recipient of reviews, I've noted a recent trend among IR papers. A study uses cross-national data with regression analysis, and runs multiple models with different variables or sub-sets of the data. Sometimes the results are consistent, sometimes they aren't. But often a reviewer will object to the study's validity, pointing to the "multiple comparisons" issue. Multiple comparisons can be a real problem in quantitative IR...
Episode 2: Dan Nexon
Dan Nexon reflects on editing International Studies Quarterly.
A bigger question in the alt-ac debate
I had a kind of unique path to my current tenure-track job, straddling the policy-academia divide. So I've followed current discussions on "alt-ac" careers with interest, but found something lacking in them. Nathan Paxton's recent interview with APSA crystallized that; the bigger question is not how to support alt-ac PhDs but how to counsel people before getting PhDs in the first place. As I've discussed, I sort of followed the "alt-ac"...
All Journals Can, and Should, Provide Decision Letters and Reviewer Reports to Referees
Note: This is the third post in an occasional series in which I talk about lessons learned (or related stuff) from my time editing International Studies Quarterly. My prior posts focused on "best practices" for writing decision letters (Part I and Part II). I won't knowingly review for a journal that doesn't, as a matter of policy, share anonymized copies of decision letters and reviewer reports with referees. Once a journal makes a decision...
Has regression analysis shrunk our imaginations?
I realize this is a weird thing for me to ask, since the vast majority of my publications--as well as a few of my works in progress--have relied on regression. But I was wondering this recently based on my own and others' responses to a new project. I was presenting qualitative research recently that tried to make the case for ideas mattering in a conventional security studies topic (I'm being intentionally vague). I had a lot of evidence that...
Mission Impossible? Creating a Dialogue between Research, Policy and Practice Communities
A guest post by Julia Palik, Peace Research Institute Oslo; Govinda Clayton, Center for Security Studies, ETH Zurich; Simon J. A. Mason, Head of Mediation Support Team, Center for Security Studies, ETH Zurich; and Siri Aas Rustad, Peace Research Institute Oslo On the surface, it should be easy. Practitioners and policy makers always require better knowledge to make informed decisions, and academics (nearly) always seek that their research makes...
Non-Academic Career Paths: The Dirty Secret of Academia?
(Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images) It is a truth universally acknowledged that the academic job market is tough. Faculty openly warn political science PhD students that there are very few tenure-track jobs available, that they will be competing for those few positions against their most talented and accomplished peers, and that multiple publications and the imprimatur of an Ivy League school have become de facto pre-requisites for the top...
Oh Say Can You Say
You never know when IR is going to bite you in the ass. One minute you are reading a children’s nursery rhyme and the other you realize that the spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Ministry Ms. Zakharova read it too, but decided to use it in foreign policy discourse. The rhyme in question is by a Soviet children’s writer Samuel Marshak, a Soviet Dr. Seuss, if you will: Don’t you stand too close to me I’m a tiger, not a pussy Yes, pussy has the...
Episode 1: Jelena Subotic
Professor Jelena Subotic talks about her new book, Yellow Star, Read Star: Holocaust Remembrance after Communism.
Fieldwork and Your Health
Fieldwork – “leaving one’s home institution in order to acquire data, information, or insights that significantly inform one’s research”(Kapiszewski, MacLean, and Read 2015: 1) – has long been a cornerstone of social science research. It is a remarkably diverse enterprise: ‘doing fieldwork’ can mean carrying out archival research, interviews, surveys, focus groups, participant observation, ethnography, or experiments. Fieldwork is also quite...