Middle East scholars recently released the results of the new Middle East Scholar Barometer. What does it tell us about Middle East Studies itself? Does it suggest the field is rich and progressing, or in need of an intellectual shakeup?
Middle East scholars recently released the results of the new Middle East Scholar Barometer. What does it tell us about Middle East Studies itself? Does it suggest the field is rich and progressing, or in need of an intellectual shakeup?
Like so much else in international relations, the answer to this question seems "obvious." But, like so much else, it gets trickier when we really investigate the situation, and it reveals nuances...
Restraint in US foreign policy is having a moment. That's a good thing. But I worry it's unclear whether restraint is a means or an end, and what that end would be. Without resolving...
Depending on your Twitter addiction, you either went to sleep or woke up with the news that America had assassinated Qassim Suleimani, the commander of Iran's Quds force. Suleimani was one of the...
This week is the big nuclear security summit in Seoul, with something like 60 attending countries and over 40 heads of state or government. A friend from a Korean expat magazine here in town asked me for a brief write-up. Here are the issues as I see them from Korean IR and the local media. For full-blown think-tankery on the summit, try here. 1. Obama’s personal commitment to de-nuclearization: I can’t think of any president since Reagan who seems as personally offended by nuclear weapons as Obama. Back in the day, Reagan watched ‘The Day After,’ ‘Wargames’ and other nuclear war movies and...
Here are parts one and two, where I argued that there is no constituency in the US for the pivot, and that Asia is so culturally distant from the US, that Americans are unlikely to care enough to sustain the pivot. But we also don’t really need to pivot, nor do we have the money for it:3. The ME is characterized by so many nondemocracies that the US must be heavily invested (at least to meet current US goals – oil, Israel, counterterrorism). Katzenstein noted this; America has no strong subordinate anchor-state in the region (like Germany in Europe and Japan in Asia). This is why the GOP...
Do the responses to the plight of Dorothy Parvaz, a journalist for Al Jazeera English who was detained in Syria and Iran for nearly 3 weeks, show continued resistance to female journalists pursuing particular types of stories?Parvaz flew to Syria to gather information that could add to what little is known about local protests and government violence. She was arrested at the airport in Damascus and taken to a detention center- Parvaz likened it to a mini version of Guantanamo Bay. Three days after her arrival in Syria she was extradited to Iran as a suspected spy before being released...
Alex Cooley and I on Bahrain and US autocratic allies:U.S. officials should make efforts to decouple the rationale of a given basing relationship from support for a particular regime. This means creating political space between Washington and the policies of authoritarian host countries whenever possible. With respect to Bahrain, U.S. officials should make clear that the U.S. military maintains its facilities for the defense of its territory and for regional stability -- not for the purposes of propping up the ruling family. At the same time, Washington needs to signal that it believes that...
Nobody has come close to explaining how strategic narratives work in international relations, despite the term being banded about. Monroe Price wrote a great article in the Huffington Post yesterday that moves the debate forward. As I have already written, strategic narratives are state-led projections of a sequence of events and identities, a tool through which political leaders try to give meaning to past, present and future in a way that justifies what they want to do. Getting others at home or abroad to accept or align with your narrative is a way to influence their behaviour. But like...
Snow day again -- I watched Al Jazeera, read up on the current US debates about whether or not (and how) to support the democratic revolution in Egypt, and then turned to watch one of my favorite episodes of Yes Minister, "A Victory for Democracy." Classic and informative -- on so many levels. The real fun starts at the 4:00 minute mark and runs for the duration: You can watch the whole episode -- parts 1 and 3 here and here. It's a great break.
We haven't had much to say about these topics at the Duck. Which is fine, as there are much better academic bloggers to go to for informed commentary (e.g. Marc Lynch, Juan Cole, etc.). But I am struck by this AP story, which suggests Egypt is taking additional efforts to shut down internet communications (more here and here [note: holy &*!!, the whole country appears to be cut off]) as it ramps up its crackdown.On a more abstract plane, Josh Tucker wrote an interesting post on revolution and revolutionary contagion that approvingly cites Timur Kuran's influential work on the inevitability...