Maybe we should have named the blog the "Seal of Minerva."Photo: Dan NexonThe US exit strategy in Afghanistan is in shambles; Josh Foust explains. Jing Gao describes condemnations of the anti-Japan riots on Weibo (via Doug Saunders); LA Times story quotes Jessica...
I'm sure there will be plenty of skeptics, but President Obama's speech this morning at the U.S. Holocaust Museum (see Charli's post below) and today's first meeting of the atrocity prevention board...
The keynote address for this year's NITLE Symposium was delivered by Dan Cohen, a major voice in the "digital humanities" movement and one of the leading figures behind Zotero, the open-source free...
 This is a shameless bleg to two different audiences.The first, and immediately more important, is undergraduate students who might like to take a serious course about international relations,...
On 4 June 2009 US President Obama went to Cairo to make a speech to the Muslim world, where, among other things, he addressed the question of political reform and democracy in the Middle East. In February 2011 one Al-Jazeera columnist has associated the tumultuous changes in Egypt and Tunisia to the persuasive technique Inception, the film in which Leonardo DiCaprio tries to plant ideas in individuals’ minds by infiltrating their dreams. Larbi Sadiki writes, ‘A precedent has been set in Tunisia, and Egypt is on the move. Whilst the challenges are awesome, the seeds for planting democratic...
The conversation on last week's tragedy in Tucson has gone from the absurd to the absurd to the absurd. The late George Gerbner who was the long-time Dean of the Annenberg School of Communication at UPenn and who later finished his career at Temple University was a pioneer in the study of media influences on society and violence. He frequently warned against assuming or inferring a direct relationship from a specific media event or elite cue to a specific personal or political behavior. His research suggested a more diffuse, but real, effect of the constant media bombardment of images and...
Robert Farley has written a veritably excellent post on the need for liberals (er, "progressives") to get serious about defense policy.I only wish to add that it is time for international-relations scholars to re-engage with defense policy and "hard" security questions. We're going through a revolution in military affairs, a power transition, and two U.S.-led wars, but not that many political scientists work on "guns and bombs" issues.* Moreover, political science produces very few PhDs competent to do so.Most of security studies deals with issues such as crisis bargaining, alliance choice,...
Courtesy of our friends at The Economist:PhD graduates do at least earn more than those with a bachelor’s degree. A study in the Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management by Bernard Casey shows that British men with a bachelor’s degree earn 14% more than those who could have gone to university but chose not to. The earnings premium for a PhD is 26%. But the premium for a master’s degree, which can be accomplished in as little as one year, is almost as high, at 23%. In some subjects the premium for a PhD vanishes entirely. PhDs in maths and computing, social sciences and languages...
Recent developments in Europe, and especially the ongoing meltdown in Ireland, should force political economists to reevaluate how well their theories can explain the perpetuation of current international regimes. The past twenty years of IPE theorizing has been exceptionally exciting and productive, but as Kathleen McNamara and others have argued the tendency toward intellectual monoculture may have left the discipline without a toolkit for understanding tectonic shifts in international actors' behavior.In the 1990s, the Washington consensus attained something of the status of divine writ....
A couple of observations on the Wikileaks diplomatic info-dump as seen from London. First, European governments have been unanimous in their condemnation of Wikileaks, disgraceful undermining of diplomacy etc etc. But what do they really think? I’m sure they will be philosophical about the content of the US cables. These are the sort of assessments that every diplomat makes, and is supposed to make; I would bet a year’s salary that the sort of things American diplomats said about David Cameron would pale into insignificance beside the sort of things British diplomats said about George W....
Will no one think of the bacon?Hat tip to Robert Farley
In discussing the planned handover of security responsibilities to the Afghan National Army, Vice President Joe Biden stated:"Daddy is going to start to take the training wheels off in October -- I mean in next July -- so you'd better practice riding," he said of the plan that will be outlined at the NATO summit in Lisbon.  (ABC News Radio)The undiluted mix of imperialism and paternalism, while embarrassing from a public relations standpoint, is a good guide to how the US plans to spin the transition.  The US and ISAF will seek to shift responsibility and hence the blame for a precarious and...