Given some of the recent discussion on the Duck about the use of force in the Arabian Gulf, I thought I'd point out something interesting from the recent TRIP survey of international relations scholars. It turns out that between 60 and 90 percent of IR scholars...
I'm already de facto on hiatus from blogging, so I might as well come out and say it: I'm not going to be writing much, if anything, on the Duck for a bit longer.Our regular readers may have noticed...
How much more excitement can the Senate handle? With prospect of a confirmation hearing heating up the Hill, this crosses the web-page of the Washington Post: Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) was arrested...
Posting at the Duck has been thin of late. Some quick explanations:I'm tied up by teaching responsibilities and the task of finishing my book manuscript. Patrick's similarly swamped with his own...
The latest issue of Foreign Affairs has a fascinating piece by Alex Cooley called "Base Politics." Cooley writes about the dilemmas posed by American basing policy in the context of the kinds of political regimes that play host to US military bases. Cooley echoes some of the claims I made way back in a debate over Uzbekistan and K2, but he does so with far greater knowledge and eloquence. None of this is surprising, since Cooley has spent a great deal of time studying American basing policy and the "political economy" of American bases abroad. As he argues, there are real costs associated...
Stuff worth looking at:Zenpundit's roundtable on "Globalization and War" kicked off today. Mark put together a good, and very diverse, group of people to contribute. I'm already annoyed by some of the pieces, which is a good sign (I hope) that the roundtable will provoke some more general blogo-discussion.The Princeton Project on National Security has issued the report (PDF) of its Working Group on Grand Strategic Choices, which was co-chaired by Francis Fukuyama and G. John Ikenberry.
John Whitesides, of Reuters, writes:Voters across the United States went to the polls on Tuesday in elections that could gauge the depth of President George W. Bush's political woes and affect next year's critical congressional elections....With control of both chambers of the U.S. Congress and 36 governorships at stake in 2006, both parties will scour Tuesday's off-year election results for clues to next year's political climate and the long-term effect of Bush's plummeting approval ratings, now the lowest of his presidency. Mark Kennedy,of the Associated Press, tells us that, without a...
There's an interesting discussion (see also here) of the issues raised by the existence of an "information aggregator" for the International Relations job market over on IR Rumor Mill.The experience of looking for a job in the academy - or, at least, in the field of International Relations - can be a very difficult one.[fn1] At least some of the comments are best seen, in my view, as reflecting the psychological toll the job search takes on individuals, and how they respond differently to the experience.On the other hand, it is nice to see discussion of the job market's pathologies in an...
Who, in the wild world of sports, speaks out for peace and social justice in the way that Muhammad Ali once did? After all, this is the age of Nike endorsements and globalization, not protest. Well, did you hear about the former Argentine soccer star who is speaking out against the Free Trade Area of the Americas? You probably did because it was in the news this past weekend.From the BBC: [Ex-soccer star Diego Maradona] "has become the unlikely champion of the anti-American demonstrations being held around the Summit of the Americas that George Bush has been attending.Maradona presents a hit...
I've been meaning to write a new post on the question of threat inflation and intelligence failures in the run-up to the Iraq War that reacts, in part, to some questionable arguments put forth by one of my favorite center-left bloggers. However, as should be clear from my sparse posting lately, I haven't had a lot of time. So, in the meantime, here's the latest not-so-variation on the theme....Agence France Press:US military intelligence warned the Bush administration as early as February 2002 that its key source on Al-Qaeda's relationship with Iraq had provided "intentionally misleading"...
Ivo Daalder an email from Stephen Cimbala attacking humanitarian interventions. Here's a representative expert:The mechanics of Bush policy are bad enough, but the discussions on policy related Websites show that, in academia as in policy studies, there is insufficient regard for geostrategy and military history - including American history. The Philippine insurrection that followed our victory over Spain was a preview of postwar Iraq from 2003 to 2005. And has anyone seen The Battle of Algiers?Cimbala's a distinguished expert on these issues, but I have to wonder: what does the history of...
Both Patrick Jackson and I taught in Columbia's Contemporary Civilization program (CC) during our stint in graduate school. Contemporary Civilization is the capstone (or, at least, we viewed it that way) in Columbia's core curriculum; it is a classic "Western Civilization" course in the "Plato to NATO" idiom. When we taught it, students read a lot of dead white guys, a few dead white women, a few dead non-whites, and, at our discretion, some people who are actually still alive.I hesitate to speak for Patrick, but I know I will go to the mat to defend "Contemporary Civilization" and other...