Just like any other medium, video games can serve pedagogical purposes.
Just like any other medium, video games can serve pedagogical purposes.
Dear Readers, In this post, I would like to focus on the few ways in which the blogosphere and social media more generally help junior scholars. I will use myself as an example. It is not easy for...
In the past week, there has been a heap of controversy here over a post that many folks found to be offensive. In reaction, the blogger is ceasing to blog, Charli discuss the challenges of...
This is a guest post by Peter S. Henne. Peter is a doctoral candidate at Georgetown University. He formerly worked as a national security consultant. His research focuses on terrorism and religious...
This is the first in a series of guest posts by Stuart J. Kaufman of the University of Delaware. Stuart advances a long-running dispute with PTJ about whether "what goes on inside people's heads" is relevant to social constructionism. PTJ doesn't think so; Stuart disagrees. After the final post, we will make the entire piece available as a PDF -- consider it our first true "working paper" publication.When scholars hold up physics as a model for how social science should operate, they tend to focus on the neat equations that physics is able to generate to explain physical phenomena. A more...
Anne-Marie Slaughter's recent Atlantic article, "Why Women Still Can't Have It All,"Â has stirred up a fair amount of controversy in the last couple of days. Dozens of my Facebook friends have posted and reposted it, and it has prompted many of them to reflect on their personal experiences with womanhood, femininity, parenting, and/or motherhood. Several students have asked me about the article and my opinions on it, and it seems to be stirring up debate and discussion wherever read. To me, that's the mark of a good article - that it inspires contemplation and argument. On top of that,...
From Mother Jones, of all places. Gayle Falkenthal comments.
Can China create the next Steve Jobs? The New Yorker discusses a quasi-official Chinese attempt to find the next Steve Jobs--a sort of Apprentice with less Donald Trump and more pseudo-Confucian standards. As the New Yorker reporter Jiayang Fan writes, there is something bizarre in the contest. But there is also something revealing about how countries partake of international relations in a world once presumed to be post-nationalist.The first oddity is the contest's presumption that there should have been a Chinese Jobs or Bill Gates, someone who represents a transformative genius who...
Barbara Walter and I have started a new blog called Political Violence @ a Glance. Check out the About page to see, well, what we’re about. We have a great group of contributors lined up (including Duck's own contributor Steve Saideman), a handful of posts already published, and plenty more on the way. Feel free to cruise by.--reposted from the Monkey Cage--
Guest post by Katherine Boom, University of Massachusetts-Amherst      As Bashar al-Assad’s violent crackdown on civilian protesters unfolds, the international community agonizes over how to punish the Syrian government. But while the debate rages over whether to respond to Assad through sanctions, military intervention or a punitive tribunal, few are questioning how to treat his third-party supporters. No case of mass atrocity occurs in a vacuum: states or groups committing crimes receive support from outside sources. Yet the international mechanisms for punishing crimes against...
Seven years ago today, 28 May 2005, is the day that this blog was, in an important sense, born. The previous day the day Dan officially posted the announcement that The Duck of Minerva was henceforth a collective enterprise (he said "collaborative endeavor," but whatever), and on the 28th, Bill Petti and I started weighing in with posts of our own: Bill on nuclear (non-)proliferation, and me -- in what should have been an early signal that I wasn't exactly going to be doing mainstream IR as my regular schtick here -- on "momentum" and why it's a poor metaphor for events in social life, even...
You don't understand the power of offensive realism. From Steve Coll's Private Empire:Vice President Cheney seemed particularly interested in China's vulnerability to U.S. naval power. His experience of the global oil market while running Halliburton had left him with a deep understanding of oil's fungible nature. But his thinking about national security was influenced, too, by historical narratives about the rise and fall of great powers, and particularly the history of control of the sas, which had been critical to Great Britain and the United States, in succession, as a means to ensure...