Especially considering that I recently criticized the human security community for failing to pay enough attention to urban violence, I'm delighted to hear of this upcoming web seminar on the topic at Harvard's Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research....
Herman Von Rompuy is going to steal your sovereignty.Also, Christmas.There is something refreshing in British newspapers. Empires come and empires go, but tabloids are one of life's constants. So...
In lieu of friday nerd blogging last week (which I saw Vikash had covered) Rob Farley and I blogged heads about gender in Foreign Policy, gender and race in Game of Thrones, and popular culture in...
This post started off as a reply to a comment under Robert Kelly's post on historical institutionalism, but it got so long I thought it deserved its own post.There is a great deal of ambiguity in...
Before I begin, I should thank those who have offered encouragement to continue the series and note, to those few who have not, that this is satire. Like all satire, it is an exaggeration of things that nevertheless have a kernel of truth. I myself am guilty of some of these things, like collecting original data. It is not an indictment of the field of political science, only a send-up of its pretensions. OK, here we go.Political scientists like discovering the strategic logic behind all political phenomena, reducing everything to the self-interested calculations of individuals. They...
In the tradition of the satirical website, Stuff White People Like, I offer you the first installment of Stuff Political Scientists Like, which I will offer in irregular installments if political scientists like it. This seemed only appropriate since in the words of the author of that website: "It is important to note that a high percentage of white people also get degrees in Political Science, which is pretty much like arts, and only seems to have the word “science” in it to make white people feel better about themselves."Political scientists like "original datasets." The topic is really...
In prepping for a fortuitously timely class session on humanitarian intervention, I reread Madeline Albright's op-ed from 2008 on the "end of intervention." The claim, which I bought at the time, was that the perceived illegitimacy of the Iraq War had resuscitated the norm of state sovereignty, which had taken some hits since the end of the Cold War. Implicit in the piece was that the invasion of Iraq had disillusioned formerly "liberal hawks," particularly as Bush's rhetoric had been so instrumentally idealistic. I never bought that neoconservatives are really concerned about human rights....
I was fortunate enough to participate in an ISA panel yesterday morning entitled "The Third Generation of Constructivist Thought: Boundaries, Distinctions, Limits -- Social Theory, Philosophy, and Constructivism," organized by Benjamin Herborth and Oliver Kessler. I decided to take the opportunity to deliver a little sermon on the counterproductive enterprise of trying to sharply define "constructivism" as a single coherent theory of anything, let alone a single coherent theory of world politics. Podcast here; the basic summary of my claim, along with my replies to some audience questions...
About a month ago, the symposium on my book over at The Disorder of Things that I mentioned in an earlier post reached a critical stage: posts by Paul, Joe, Nick, and Meera were up, and it was now my turn. And then life intervened, and lo and behold it's been almost a month and I haven't put up a reply. I finally got a chance to start work on a reply this weekend, but it's grown so large in conception that I am going to have to split it into three parts. The first part is below the fold in this post; the second and third parts will follow shortly, depending -- in all honesty -- on how much...
Dan and I spent the last few days in London doing a variety of talks that might be of some interest to the general Duck readership.On Wednesday I gave a book talk at SOAS; I'm quite pleased at the way this one turned out. Podcast here; q and a here. And the sci-fi author part of the session is available to listen to here.On Thursday Dan and I participated in the LSE's Literary Festival on a pair of roundtables entitled "Science Fiction an International orders." Liveblog by Stephanie (as most of you probably already know) here; my contribution podcast here; Dan's contribution here.On Friday...
India has soft power to the extent that its values, its way of managing its affairs and its vision for the international system are so attractive to other nations that the latter start doing what India wants without India having to use the sticks and carrots of traditional international relations. By achieving relatively stable democracy in such a geographically large and religiously diverse polity, for instance, India may inspire others to emulate its institutions. Nevertheless, to understand Indian soft power, we must first ask how others see India. Indian soft power is a function of...
I’ve just finished reading Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History and would highly recommend it to those interested in rights and norms. I have written a review of it that will eventually appear in the American Historical Review. Meanwhile, for those who just can't wait, my main points: Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia is an erudite and impressive intellectual history, portraying the core principle of contemporary human rights--that individual rights transcend state sovereignty--as a strikingly recent invention. . . .Moyn argues that early views of rights were welded to the...