Nothing risks inviting cynicism and despair like teaching and learning about failed states. For the second year I'm teaching an upper level International Relations course titled "Weak and Failed States" in the Poli Sci Department at UMass Amherst. Much to the...
It would appear that, like Bill Murray before us, we are doomed to repeat the insufferable lead up to the Iraq War and endure major strategic blunder numero dos.Shorter Frederick Fleitz: 'US...
I'm on an academic IR theory mailing list that frequently receives email about possible 9/11 conspiracies. Most of the time, I just delete these posts, but every now and then I click a link just to...
For those that haven’t been paying attention, the Bush administration has launched its 2006 midterm-framing campaign for dealing with the Iraq debacle. Not surprisingly it’s a familiar riff, one...
Last weekend my wife and son and I went to a baseball game at Yankee Stadium. It was Old Timers' Day, so the actual game between the Yankees and the Cleveland Indians was preceded by a couple of innings featuring a set of retired players who had formerly played for the Yankees. There was a lot of pomp and fanfare as these old-timers were introduced, and it was a great thrill to watch Mel Stottlemeyer, the current Yankees pitching coach, take the mound and actually throw a few pitches.At some point during the festivities I started thinking about how this must all look to anyone who wasn't a...
When my wife dragged me to a performance of St. John's Passion at Lincoln Center a few years back, I could feel myself turning gay. A quick exit, however, saved my marriage and kept me on the straight and narrow. Seriously, either these guys are just completely ignorant or it's the start of the secret agenda of the Christian conservative movement: first the Catholics, next the Lutherans....Filed as: stupidity
Leon de Winter in the New York Times (via Marc Schulman):FOR centuries the Netherlands has been considered the most tolerant and liberal nation in the world. This attitude is a byproduct of a disciplined civic society, confident enough to provide space for those with different ideas. It produced the country in which Descartes found refuge, a center of freedom of thought and of a free press in Europe.The murder last year of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, whose killer was convicted this week, and the assassination of the politician Pim Fortuyn in 2002 marked the end of the Holland of Erasmus and...
I've been reading through R.J. Rummel's blog which, as one of his regular commentators puts it, is kind of a "public seminar" on the virtues of democracy in terms of inter-state and intra-state violence. Rummel's blog is, indeed, not just a really excellent academic advocacy website but a nice "public seminar."Rummel was one of the first contemporary advocates of the Democratic Peace. The basic idea is that if two states are democracies then they will not got to war with one another. He also developed the idea of "democide" and is a tireless advocate of the argument that democracies do not...
Jonathan J. Monten, a graduate student at Georgetown, has just published a piece called "The Roots of the Bush Doctrine: Power, Nationalism, and Democracy Promotion in U.S. Strategy" in International Security. Jon is one of what I hope will be a growing wave of scholars seeking to combine (in a coherent manner) structural realism with arguments about the role of ideology and identity in world politics. This is a research program Stacie Goddard and I recently advocated in our own article, "Paradigm Lost? Reassessing Theory of International Politics" (European Journal of International...
I wasn't in my office on Wednesday, and thus didn't post a maxim. Given Dan Drezner's recent post on prospect theory and terrorism, I thought it would be interesting to post Guicciardini's views, in effect, on the rational-choice controversy in International Relations:What I said earlier about princes also applies to people with whom you must deal: always keep an eye not so much on what reason dictates they ought to do, as on what you believe they will do, in view of their nature and their habits (Series C, 151)Filed as: Guicciardini and maxims
I've pulled my post entitled "Tim Burke Wows Me." I want to write a more substantive reflection - and call for discussion - on what, if anything, the online debate about Theory's Empire tells us about "post-prefixed" approaches to IR, and that post will get in the way. Apologies to people with an RSS feed.
Robert Farley doesn't think much of Wretchard's (of the Belmont Club) take on the Battle of Guadalcanal. Here's what Rob has to say:So much is wrong with this; Wolcott does an effective job of demolishing the hyper-masculinity of Wretchard's argument. Let's be frank, if Al Qaeda were given the option of fighting Americans by Marquess of Queensbury rules on an open field in the middle of Afghanistan, they'd leap at it. Winning a war, in spite of what the boys at Belmont think, is not about having a larger set of balls.I agree that there's something a bit unseemly about treating...