On Friday, I gave some remarks in Dallas, Texas to a group of young leaders from different professions as part of the Next Generation Project organized by the Strauss Center for International Security and Law. For this diverse  audience, I tested what I described in my last post a "Go Right" messaging strategy on global warming, designed to appeal to partisans and nonpartisans alike.  You be the judge if this effort was successful. I've added some hyperlinks of sources I drew upon to write the speech.It’s great to be here with all of you and to have the opportunity to participate in another...

Nothing risks inviting cynicism and despair like teaching and learning about failed states. For the second year I'm teaching an upper level International Relations course titled "Weak and Failed States" in the Poli Sci Department at UMass Amherst. Much to the confusion of my students, I introduce the course by explaining that "weak and failed states" is a highly contested concept, driven more by policy agendas than empirical consistencies, and analytical re-conceptualized so many times over that it's almost entirely useless. In other words, welcome to Political Science! But, as a catch-all...

I remember well the first time I ever encountered the concept of "fair trade": it was on a poster in the cafeteria of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Bonn, where I spent time during the summer of 2002 doing research in the "Archives of Social Democracy" for my first book. The poster proudly proclaimed that the coffee served in the cafeteria was fair trade coffee, and explained the basic principle -- growers were paid a decent wage for their product -- along with urging people to purchase fair trade coffee elsewhere. Before too long I started to see the same symbol for fair trade...

A few of us in the Politics/IR Department at Reading were asked to summarise the major results and effects of the war in Afghanistan for its tenth anniversary today. I should have talked more about the overall economic crisis that the war on terror has accelerated, but anyway:Today is the 10th anniversary of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan. But it is not the anniversary of the start of the war between the United States, the Al Qaeda network, and the Taliban. The armed struggle can be dated earlier to Osama Bin Laden’s fatwa and unilateral declaration of war on the US in August 1996. After...

In an effort to change the conversation from the Duck's current all-Jobs all the time format, let me simply commend Jorge Cham, the creator of Ph.D. Comics, and the rest of his crew for the Ph.D. Comics movie, which manages to be everything that a satisfying break from writing code should be: Funny, heartwarming, and short. Graduate students, see it soon. Faculty members can see it too, but not at the same screening as your grad students; after all, do you really want to know how hard they laugh at the jokes about clueless professors?

Steve Jobs occupied a unique place in American business and culture; no other billionaire in my life has commanded genuine affection from the general public, and nobody deserved it more. The Financial Times reports that Jobs's passing has elicited similar responses in P.R. China. One Chinese academic wrote of Jobs:It is said Chinese people hate the rich. But all the Chinese are mourning for Jobs after he died. They don’t hate the rich. They respect the rich who accumulate their fortune via talents and innovation as well. What Chinese people hate are those get rich by monopoly, corruption and...

Forget protest movements and populist politics, to say nothing of academic blogging and scholarship -- if you want to change the world in your lifetime, this is the guy you ought to emulate. RIP Steve Jobs, one of the greatest practical visionaries of our time. PS note that Jobs' inspiration for the typography on the Mac was a college course ... a perfect testimony to the indirect but important influence that we academics can have on the world. Our students, not our research, are our near-term legacy -- even, perhaps, our "failed" students who end up doing insanely great things with our...