I am concluding a semester-long experiment in incorporating a theory/policy writing simulation of sorts into my doctoral level "Human Security" seminar. This struck me as important both because my own doctoral training left me unprepared for writing for practitioners, and because the divergent socialization of academic professionals into scholarly versus non-scholarly writing has been cited as a key impediment to successful communication with those to whom our ideas and knowledge could conceivably matter.In fact since "human security" is both an academic field and a policy domain this...

 My new book, The Global Right Wing and the Clash of World Politics, has recently been published by Cambridge University Press.  It is available on Kindle for $12.10, Nook for $14.74, and as a paperback for $21.59.   For a free chapter, chapter excerpts, contents, and more please visit my website.  The Global Right Wing explores the vibrant world of conservative activism.  It examines how America's National Rifle Association (NRA), its Christian Right, and many other right-wing groups have shed their parochialism to become powerful international players.  They now join their ideological...

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 with the Express, which has discovered "EU Plot To Scrap Britain": The new bureaucrat, who would not be directly elected by voters, is set to get sweeping control over the entire EU and force member countries into ever-greater political and economic union. Tellingly, the UK has been excluded from the confidential discussions within the shady “Berlin Group” of Europhile politicians, spearheaded by...

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 foreign affairs. [Warning: There are some mild and at least one not-so-mild TV and book spoilers in our GoT discussion. However we do let you know when these are coming.]On the subject of FP's Swimsuit Issue, Rob asked me a great question: "What did Foreign Policy do right?" I provided a facetious answer in my earlier post, and a rambling one in the video , so here's the concise, honest version:1)...

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 how we use the term "decision" in contemporary IR, an ambiguity that also infects the closely related concept of "choice." Briefly, we use these terms to refer both to objects of explanation and to means of explanation -- and the ambiguity of our usage leads the the misleading conclusion that to explain decisions or choices necessarily involves a micro-reductionist account of interests, beliefs, and...

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 at the White House is a positive development. For the past twenty years -- since the beginning of the Bosnian War -- the U.S. has gradually increased the resources and institutional capacities for collecting and analyzing intelligence, preventing, and coordinating responses to mass atrocities. Yet, it is clear that even with these efforts, the U.S. government efforts have continued to be plagued...

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 EndNote killer research tool. Cohen outlined a vision of 'Net-enabled scholarly publishing that I can only think to call the aggregation model: editorial committees scanning the 'Net to find the most interesting scholarly content in a given field or discipline, and highlighting it through websites and e-mail blasts that hearken back to the early days when weblogs were literally just collections of...

 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, political science, and science fiction this summer. During the first summer term, I'm picking up Dan's section of Government 310: Interstellar Relations.The second, and closely related, audience is the readers of this blog, to whom I turn to help improve my syllabus. I wanted to do something a little different than Dan or PTJ's version. Summers here are shorter than the semester, and I wanted the...