Musgrave’s identification of dangerous ideas is correct, but his metaphor risks entrenching the fundamental problem: the (inevitable) weaponization of “scientific objectivity.”
Musgrave’s identification of dangerous ideas is correct, but his metaphor risks entrenching the fundamental problem: the (inevitable) weaponization of “scientific objectivity.”
Political Science isn’t sterile laboratory. The discipline is riddled with politics and deeply influenced by policy concerns.
Paul Musgrave has written an important piece discussing how ideas developed within academia can have profoundly negative effects when they escape into the wild of the policymaking world....
One reason that Patrick I stepped down as a permanent contributors to the Duck of Minerva was to develop ISQ Online as a forum for intellectual exchange surrounding International Studies Quarterly...
This activity comes after students are to have listened to a lecture (slides) about domestic politics helps us understand variation in the likelihood of international conflict. I focused particularly on whether the spread of democracy explains Europe's transformation from one of the most violent parts of the world to one of the most peaceful and how the the fear of coups and rebellion in Sub-Saharan Africa helps explain why there have been so few interstate wars there. I closed out the portion focusing on the democratic peace by discussing how territorial disagreements both promote war and...
Stop me if you've heard this one: it appears that wars between pairs of democracies are relatively rare compared to wars between other pairs of states. Some people even think this relationship might be causal. In the decades since this empirical regularity first got everyone's attention, a number of different theoretical arguments have been developed to account for it. A little known problem with all such explanations is that their additional observable implications are at odds with empirical observation. As I mentioned when Dan interviewed me for a Duck podcast, every major explanation...
2012 interview with Phil Arena.
For awhile I was collecting links and such to make an argument about Korea and Japan working together on big issues like China and NK, or finally clinching the much-discussed but little worked-on FTA. Both the realist and the liberal in me wanted to see two liberal democracies working together in a tough environment with similar structural threats. Initially I had written: “This may be the biggest news of the year if it actualizes: Japan is apparently considering real defense cooperation with SK. If you follow East Asian security, this is a revolution. Try here, here and here.” But this is...
Democratic peace theory is featured prominently in the latest issues of two different major IR journals. First, in International Studies Perspectives, Jameson Lee Ungerer tells us that the democratic peace exemplifies in three respects the Lakatosian ideal of a progressive research program, and provides an overview of the research agenda from 1970s to the present. He describes many (though not all) of the key causal arguments claiming to explain the democratic peace, concluding that: Of all the theories examines, two [are] the most progressive: the economic norms explanation, which proposed...
Timothy Peterson and Leah Graham recently published a study in the Journal of Conflict Resolution showing that, after you control for the democratic peace, similarities in human rights performance have an important effect on any two countries' likelihood to go to war. The interesting caveat is that this finding holds true for states that abuse their citizens as well as those that don't:Although mutual norms of domestic non-violence are more pacifying than mutual disregard thereof, the authors argue that a wide disparity in norms is more aggravating than shared norms... that norm asymmetry is...
Peter Singer has an op-ed in the Times which carefully makes the case against drones by carefully putting forth the proposition that their use undermines democracy: What troubles me, though, is how a new technology is short-circuiting the decision-making process for what used to be the most important choice a democracy could make... We must now accept that technologies that remove humans from the battlefield, from unmanned systems like the Predator to cyberweapons like the Stuxnet computer worm, are becoming the new normal in war. And like it or not, the new standard we’ve established for...
The 2008 Summer Olympic games kicked off today in Beijing, on the same day as Russia and Georgia go to war. Correlation? Causation?John Hoberman's "Think Again" article in the most recent issue of Foreign Policy would have us believe that the Olympics are not only irrelevant to, but actually bad for world order and international cooperation: "The real genius of the IOC is its ability to create and sustain the myth that it promotes peace. In reality... trapped by its grandiose goal of embracing the entire 'human family' at whatever cost, the IOC has repeatedly caved in and awarded the games...