Alongside research and teaching, most tenure-track jobs come with some expectation of service.
Strategic Service on the Tenure Track
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Book Review: Arms Control – History, Theory and Policy
Praeger has published a new two-volume compendium on arms control edited by Robert Williams Jr. and Paul R.Viotti. If you're writing anything on the subject of arms, weapons advocacy or national...
Friday Punctual Nerd Blogging/Blegging
Last week, I embedded with smart people thinking hard about ethics, armed conflict and emerging technologies. I learned that it's an open questions whether governments can or should move toward...
Do Battle Droids Dream of Electric Medals?
One of the more interesting issues raised informally during the time I spent at the Lincoln Center's Emerging Technologies Workshop was the relative likelihood of developments in lethal autonomous...
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Interstellar Relations: A New Old Course At Georgetown
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...
Belated Friday Nerd Blogging.
Though my ISA experience was indeed interrupted both by an ultimate game and a nasty case of the flu, rumors of my disappearance have been wildly exaggerated. A travel-intensive Friday day plus a kid-intensive Saturday are all that have impeded timely nerd blogging this week. It won't happen often.
Has US political communication risen from the dead?
The 2012 International Studies Association (ISA) Annual Convention in San Diego this week was a good opportunity to test the state of US political communication. Studies of political communication in previous ISAs have been marked by an obsession with analyzing media content then extrapolating about how politics or IR works. The latest content analysis of the New York Times and Washington Post is presented as if this is a bellweather for public discourse. Comparing US elite press to the Guardian or even Le Monde is seen as a radical step, allowing for claims about “international” public...
Kim can rap, but can he run the World Bank?
I've been conspicuously silent on the matter of who would or should succeed Robert Zoellick as President of the World Bank. This was because I was convinced that it was coming down to a Hobson's choice between two narcissistic, white male economists: Larry Summers, former World Bank chief economist, infamous for composing an internal memo in which he outlined the pristine economic logic of exporting industrial waste to the Third World; and Jeffrey Sachs, an self-nominated development diva who hangs out with rock stars and is really high on bed nets and the "big push for aid". A few other...
The Neocons Made Me Do It: Iraq and the Alibi of Liberal Hawks
Looking back on the disaster (or extremely Pyhrric Victory) that was the Iraq War, Stephen Walt reflects:'The remarkable thing about the Iraq war is how few people it took to engineer. It wasn't promoted by the U.S. military, the CIA, the State Department, or oil companies. Instead, the main architects were a group of well-connected neoconservatives, who began openly lobbying for war during the Clinton administration... As the New York Times' Thomas Friedman told Ha'aretz in May 2003: 'Iraq was the war neoconservatives wanted... the war the neoconservatives marketed.... I could give you the...
Roseanne vs Kim: TV icons and the Republican ‘war on women’
Over the last few weeks it has been hard not to get overwhelmed by all the headlines related to the Republican primaries and women. There has been theRush Limbaugh fiasco, with Rush outdoing his usual dink-guisting self by calling law student Sarah Fluke a slut. This has been followed by outrageous comments from almost all the Republican candidates: Romney just declared that he would get rid of planned parenthood, Newt has had a consistent 'woman problem' (and I don't mean his two ex-wives), and Santorum has had a string of great one-liners, including the recent declaration that sex should...
Anger in America
Rush Limbaugh, the teaparty, OWS, all the way to the seven sisters -- a deeply misguided Smith College alumna, an open feud between Barnard and Columbia... and so it goes... Bobcat Goldthwait's new dark satire, God Bless America is supposed to be an hysterical look at the mixing of stupidity and anger. I just hope its funny....
Here is something you can’t understand….
...How I could just kill a man!Obama said today, or at least I think it was today, that "we have Israel's back." So have we replaced the cowboy swagger bullshit with some urban swagger bullshit? Fo shizzle.In general, I object to any dumbing down of foreign policy, even in the public discourse, and I don't really think Presidents did this before. This seems to be a modern phenomenon. But now, apparently even Obama feels the need to talk in this over-simplistic way. Ladies and gentlemen, President B-Real. If only that were a blunt he is smoking. Add the 40, and away we go!I always hated the...