We are pleased to welcome some new guest Ducks, including an exciting new partnership. We also are pleased that guest bloggers, Lisa Gaufman, Jeff Stacey, Jeremy Youde, and Will Winecoff will continue to blog for the Duck. We wanted to thank all the guest bloggers who contributed last year including Maryam Deloffre, Alexis Henshaw, Charles Martel, Raul Pacheco-Vega, and Mira Sucharov. Our first guest is a little different than the others. We...
This is a guest post by Manjana Milkoreit, Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Purdue University. Her research integrates international relations scholarship and cognitive theory to study actor motivations and policy design in global climate change politics. She is the author of Mindmade Politics: the Cognitive Roots of International Climate Governance (The MIT Press 2017). If Harvey’s unprecedented battering of...
The Financial Times just announced guidance that there will no longer be all male panels -- manels -- at any FT or partner events. It made me think whether APSA or ISA should adopt a similar policy. Pleased that @FT has established a "no manels" rule for FT panels and FT panellists as one of our diversity/inclusion initiatives. pic.twitter.com/6VZSuhlkEo — Andrew Hill (@andrewtghill) August 21, 2017 The Emerging Norm Against Manels In the past...
Trump's speech has something for everyone ... to criticize. I will not focus here on how icky the first part on loyalty was. Instead, I focus on the rules of US Civil-Military Relations: the US military does not like to start new wars (see Deborah Avant) once involved in a war, the US military likes to escalate. They want more troops, as if more means better. More can be better, but that really depends on the strategy and the adversary and...
This is a guest post by James Goldgeier, Professor of International Relations and former Dean at the School of International Service at American University, building on a twitter thread that addressed tenure and reappointment and the narratives people write that go into their packages. At many universities, the end of summer marks the beginning of the internal review process for faculty on the tenure track. (Most departments and schools sent...
This is a guest post (begun as a set of hasty scribbles on Facebook in the wake of Charlottesville) by Sean Parson, Assistant Professor in the Departments of Politics and International Affairs and the MA program in Sustainable Communities at Northern Arizona University. He is the author of Cooking up a Revolution: Food Not Bombs, Anarchist Homeless Activism and the Politics of Space (forthcoming). So the modern racial system is a result of...
As the fall semester approaches, we're looking for a few good Ducks. We'd like to bring on a new slate of guest Duck bloggers to continue to bring IR-related insights to bear on important real world problems, to explore important debates in the academy, and to do some professional introspection. We're especially keen on having gender balance and increasing representation of voices from beyond North America and other important perspectives. Here...
The following is a guest post from Jennifer Spindel and Robert Ralston, Ph.D. Candidates in Political Science at the University of Minnesota. On 26 July 2017, Donald Trump announced, via Twitter, that the US Government would “not accept or allow transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the US military.”[1] Notably, the tweets were sent exactly 69 years after President Harry Truman issued the order to integrate the US military. Even...
Sometimes when we look for a rallying call to join us as humans around a common cause or to show us our equal vulnerability, we say these trite sayings like “ Common-sense says that all men put their pants on one leg at a time.” This is supposed to reassure us that we are all equal in the most “animalistic” of ways (because you know, animals wear pants). Here is the problem and the reality though: I cannot buy jeans that are not skinny...
A guest post by Layna Mosley, Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (with contributions from John Granville Peterson Cluverius, Mark Copelovitch, Roger Halchin, Andrew Herring, Jordy Lobe, Julia Lynch, W.K. Winecoff). Financial markets continue to take the Trump presidency in stride, but the last six months have been tough. Political scientists worry that the Trump presidency is undermining our...
In a 2014 interview, Nick Onuf argued that IR has lost coherence as a field and should instead be considered “as a species of social relations and [to] abandon IR theory for social theory.” Were that to be the case, the work of Peter Berger would certainly contend for space at the top of the list of required reading. Berger, who passed away late last month, is well known to constructivist (and sympathetic) scholars for his 1966 book co-authored...
The following is a guest post from Jeff Colgan, the Richard Holbrooke Associate Professor at Brown University. Colgan is a Bridging the Gap Policy Engagement Fellow. Follow him on Twitter at @JeffDColgan This publication was made possible (in part) by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York. The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author. July 20 marks six months into the Donald J. Trump...