I'm not sure if my colleagues here at the Duck teach critical theory in their IR theory courses. I do, at least in my master's class.My classes ended last month, but I have a homework assignment just begging for a student population. Write an "immanent critique" of the following passage from President George W. Bush. Monday May 22, this question for President Bush came from a member of the audience at the Arie Crown Theater at Lakeside Center -- McCormick Place, Chicago:Speaking of oil-producing countries that are not friendly to the United States right now, I'm very concerned about what's...

Montenegro votes for independence. Probably. By a hair. Rob Farley points to Doug Muir's excellent pre-vote post. It looks like EU politics may have made the difference in a vote that mapped largely onto ethnic and religious divisions. The BBC:Serb politicians, Orthodox church leaders and Montenegrins from the mountainous inland regions bordering Serbia broadly opposed secession.However, ethnic Montenegrins and Albanians from the coastal area largely back the prime minister and favoured independence.Mr Djukanovic argued that an independent Montenegro will have a stronger economy and will be...

Victor Davis Hanson takes on the "too few troops" criticism of the Bush administration's war plan. He approaches the topic with the same discursive style that his readers have grown to love. After lobbing some largely irrelevant attacks on the critics' motives, VDH advances five arguments. First, the claim that we’ve deployed too few troops can apply only since the fall of Baghdad in April 2003. Whatever the difficulties of the three-week war, it took out the worst regime in the Middle East in record time. How could half a million troops have done significantly better?Strange but false. On...

Dan Drezner's at Princeton discussing liberal internationalism, so he posts this rather interesting placeholder on his blog:One question that came up at today's sessions was pretty basic but rather important: how, exactly, would one define liberal internationalism? It's one of those terms that foreign policy wonks like to throw around, but often means very different things to different people.[So what's your definition, smart guy?--ed. A marriage between the pursuit of liberal purposes (security, free trade, human rights, rule of law, democracy promotion, etc.) and the use of...

I arrived back in Columbus yesterday after spending about five days in Bielefeld, Germany. I chose not to purchase the insanely expensive WLAN access offered by the conference hotel and instead relied on a nearby internet cafe--which was fine for checking my mail, but not so much for blogging. I have a couple of posts stored up, so expect to hear from me a great deal over the next week.A few impressions from my first trip to Germany.• Delta Airlines has very friendly service and pretty decent food. The "extras" on the plane--video service and so forth--left a great deal to be desired....

In the war on terror, the United States now officially considers Venezuela part of the problem. The BBC today: The US is to impose a ban on arms sales to Venezuela, US state department officials have said.A spokeswoman, Darla Jordan, said the decision was taken because of lack of support by Venezuela for counter-terrorism efforts. Condi Rice expressed disappointment in October 2003 at Venezuela's failure to live up to its "responsibilities in the hemisphere to fight terrorism, to fight narco-trafficking." Thus, this is not altogether new policy.Libya and Muammar Qaddafi, by contrast, are now...

From https://www.colorado.edu/AmStudies/lewis/west/awfact.htm.From a Columbus Dispatch article (6/7/2006) on the role of religion in Ohio's upcoming gubernatorial race:"I want to know how they feel about it -- if they have a strong belief in God," said Republican poll participant..... "This country was set up to lead the rest of the world. God picked this country."I hope he isn't disappointed if God throws his support behind China. After all, he's already unpicked Rome, the Franks, the Caliphate, the Mongols, France, Britain, Spain, the Mughal Empire, the Ottomans....Filed as: manifest...

So here it is, the beginning of May, the end of the Spring semester, when grading piles up and other closing-out-the-academic-year chores loom and threaten. So I, like a fair number of other academics, have been spending a fair amount of time thinking about baseball. Seriously. It's not that I'm avoiding doing my other work (okay, not really . . . maybe just a bit . . .) , or that I find baseball infinitely more enjoyable than grading (grading being, in my opinion, right up there with administrative paperwork as my least favorite parts of the academic life) -- it's also that, with a month of...