I attended a celebration of the life of Kenneth Waltz held at Columbia University last weekend. The service was organized and hosted by Robert Jervis, Robert Art, and Richard Betts and included sixteen speakers -- family members, scholars, and former students who gave...
In Spring of 2006, I was nearing the end of data collection on my investigation into the human rights of children born of rape and exploitation in conflict zones, and I presented my preliminary...
 I am going to try writing down pieces of advice that I give to students all the time, in the hopes that they might be useful for people who can't make it to my office hours."Many if not most of the...
Kevin Bales, President of Free the Slaves, has won the 2011 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. The prize is worth $100,000 this year.The press release describes the award-winning...
Should IR scholars worry about material threats emanating from outside the confines of earth? IR scholars Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall sort of tackled that question in a 2008 article in the journal Political Theory. They discussed the "UFO taboo," which essentially prohibits "the authoritative public sphere" from "taking UFOs seriously." Dan gave the scholarly response some attention at the time.In any event, here's a summary of the Wendt and Duvall argument: The UFO compels decision because it exceeds modern governmentality, but we argue that the decision cannot be made. The reason is...
The most recent Utne Reader includes a short piece from Katie Krueger about the practice of "joking cousins" in Senegal:This means that whenever we meet, as a sign of friendliness, we insult each other without hesitation. Every ethnic group in Senegal has at least one or two joking cousin groups, so meeting one is rare enough to be a delight but common enough that it is protocol.Professor Brett O'Bannon of DePauw University (a former graduate student of mine) has written an academic paper arguing that such "joking relationships" are threatened by the forces of globalization. Yet, he notes,...
There have been some interesting replies to my post a couple of weeks ago about the relationship between policymaking and scholarship. Well, when it started out it was a post about the idea that teaching IR ought to be about more than certifying the idealism of our students, but as it went on it morphed into a set of complaints about the very idea of a terminal MA degree in IR. And then a discussion ensued: Rob Farley weighed in, as did Dan Drezner, I replied (some of my replies were gathered here, others are in the comments on Rob's and Dan's posts), and now both Rob and Dan have replied...
Interesting article in the New York Times about efforts to reduce the amount of time that it takes to get a Ph.D. While I have no objection to many of the strategies discussed -- give students guaranteed funding for five years, dissertation-writing groups, a culture in which advisers actually check up on how their students are coming along -- this line about the impact of increased funding gave me pause:That means students need teach no more than two courses during their schooling and can focus on research.On one hand, sure, that probably helps people finish faster. But at what cost? The...
I have this long post in draft form about U.S. foreign policy and Central Asia, but I'll probably never finish it before it gets stale (not least because I have an edited volume to finish). There is, however, a very interesting discussion going on over at Crooked Timber about academia, ideas, and progress. You can read the details yourself. I only have a few comments:1. The goal of cumulative knowledge in the social and natural sciences is all well and good. The fact is, however, that academics should strive to cite and reference prior work that is relevant to our own because our ideas are...