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...
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Two legs or One. It has nothing to do with planets- just pants.
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 Drinking Person’s Guide, Day 186
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 Memorium: Peter Berger (1929-2017)
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 Trump Administration at 6 months
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...
#MH17
Three years ago, on this day, the Malaysian Airliner MH17 flight from Amsterdam to Kuala-Lumpur was shot down over Ukraine. 298 people died. In October 2015, the Dutch Safety Board (DSB) concluded that the airliner was downed by a Buk surface-to-air missile launched from pro-Russian separatist-controlled territory in Ukraine. These findings were also confirmed in September 2016 by a Dutch-led Joint Investigation Team (JIT). The Russian...
Trump and the Russian Money Trail
This is a guest post from Seva Gunitsky, an associate professor at the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. His book Aftershocks: Great Powers and Domestic Reforms in the Twentieth Century was recently published by Princeton University Press. To understand the roots of the collusion, set aside Putin and follow the money. In the endless pursuit of the Russia-Trump collusion story, we sometimes forget a key element: this...
Climate Change is remaking American Foreign Policy
We all know the traditional narrative in International Relations of the state as a unitary act. Despite substantial volumes of work in the foreign policy analysis subdiscipline as well as in IR theory, the common shorthand in IR scholarship is to say ‘China’ did X or ‘Britain’ bombed Y. At least in the case of the United States, climate change is going to force scholars and analysts to seriously reconsider those assumptions. In the wake of the...
Motherland Calls
Y’all are probably sick and tired of hearing about Russia: hacking, colluding, obstructing, peeing, meddling, trolling, spying... I'm waiting in terror to see what Stephen Colbert has filmed in the Motherland. So far, his mispronouncing of Sergey Kislyak’s name together with fur hat clad ‘Russian hackers’ with vodka and thick accents have not been particularly impressive. To quote Seth Meyers and Amy Poehler, ‘Really?’ Throw in a mail-order...
Snipers and Democratic Control of the Military: More Oversight Please
I hinted at some politics when discussing the longest recorded sniper shot in history. That the Canadian government might not love this news because it would remind folks that there are Canadians engaged in combat in Iraq. And now, ta da: In a letter Friday to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, [NDP leader Thomas] Mulcair says the incident "seriously calls into question your government's claim that Canadian forces are not...
Gauging Public Opinion in the Age of Trump
This a guest post from Robert M. Eisinger, a political science professor at Roger Williams University. He is the author of The Evolution of Presidential Polling (Cambridge University Press). Many of us recall reading the website 538 just prior to election day, and noted that there was a 71.4% probability that Hillary Clinton would garner more than 270 Electoral College votes than Donald Trump. Despite Secretary Clinton’s amassing 2.9 million...
Duck Forum on Paris Withdrawal
With the news that the Trump Administration has signaled its intent to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement, I reached out to a number of leading experts on global climate governance and U.S. climate policy for advanced comment. Contributors include Jessica Green, Jennifer Hadden, Thomas Hale, Matthew Hoffmann, Angel Hsu, Joanna Lewis, Johannes Urpelainen, and Stacy VanDeveer. I asked all of them to reflect on the following...