I don't care much for APSA. Indeed, this year I am continuing my recent tradition of skipping it entirely. But it always occasions discussion in the political-science blogsphere. This year the focus of that discussion, at least as it pertains to conferencing as an...
Some years back I participated in a series of workshops that culminated in a book on New Systems Theories of World Politics (value priced at $115). PM and I have been working, somewhat haphazardly,...
This is of interest only to international-relations theorists and fellow travelers. A long-standing claims about hegemonic orders is that they are normative ones: that a dominant power uses a wide...
Is the society depicted in this film historically accurate? Let's perform a social-network analysis! Here's a helpful hint: the "realism" of social networks in the Iliad, Beowulf, and the Tain tell...
Professor Anne-Marie Slaughter’s talk in Parliament in London this week offered useful insights into how the Obama administration and foreign policy analysts around it are thinking about shaping international order. As Director of Policy Planning in that administration from 2009-11 she spoke from experience about the mechanisms being used to implement international change. While she touched on Syria, drone strikes and other newsworthy issues, her wide-ranging discussion was more important for the glimpses it gave of the theoretical assumptions underlying how US policymakers understand...
In fairness, fake dissertations areprobably more fun to read thanthe Little Red Book.Minxin Pei surveys the extent to which China's leaders have faked their credentials.Pei suggests that a number of China's leaders, hailed in the West by presumably credulous journalists, have in fact attained their educational credentials at what amount to diploma mills.The more interesting point Pei makes about this is that many indicators of Chinese "success," including local GDP calculations, may in fact be fraudulent. This is nothing new in China (or anywhere else, for that matter); one immediately...
[Cross-posted at Signal/Noise]Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler have released a new paper that looks at the potential predictive power of social networks. They claim that current methods of contagion detection are, at best, contemporaneous with the actual epidemic. What is needed is a true early detection method, one that would actually provide an accurate prediction of a coming epidemic.Christakis and Fowler claim that social networks can be used as sensors for various types of contagions (whether biological, psychological, informational, etc). In an inventive twist, they leverage...
My colleague, Ben O’Loughlin at Royal Holloway, has written a blog post on the potential consequences of states in the West, particularly the US and UK, increasingly relying on informal social networking of its citizens to promote foreign policy priorities. This would be a move away from the kind of ham-fisted attempts at public diplomacy seen in the wake of 9/11 aimed at getting Arab states to “like” the west to allowing every day citizens to debate the international issues of the day.Thus, “The War on Terror” becomes the “The Long Change” – or changing people’s minds.However, Ben points...
What you see on the board in the picture is the visual description of my latest research article on weapons advocacy, which will be out later this year in International Organization. Also in the picture are yours truly and Duck co-blogger Drew Conway hob-nobbing. Those things we're waving around as we talk? Yuengling beers. This took place earlier this week at the Networks in Political Science conference at Duke University, and the nature of this poster session at this friendly, fun niche geek-fest has something to teach conference organizers in big associations like ISA and APSA.Here's the...
A group from MIT won DARPA's recent balloon challenge. In case you missed it, DARPA placed ten 8-foot red balloons around the country on Friday and issued a challenge to groups to be the first to identify the correct location of all of them. The winning group received $40k.Here's how DARPA defined the challenge:a competition that will explore the roles the Internet and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems. The challenge is to be the first to submit the locations of 10 moored,...
Today's rally in Tehran was, by all accounts, truly massive. Now the BBC reports the security forces pro-Ahmadinejad militia members opened fire on at least some of its participants. I may have been premature in my assessment of the regime's ability to disrupt collective mobilization against it by targeting vectors of communication among members of the active opposition. With a united opposition still capable of turning out large numbers of people, it seems increasingly clear that the direction this all takes depends, in no small measure, on:1. Ahmadinejad's and his faction's ability to...
Some of us here at the Duck would put ourselves into the "relational" camp when it comes to how we approach Social Science. Among other things, this approach looks at social and political actors based on their relations to other actors and position within a social network rather than as autonomous entities. Dan's work, for example, has made excellent use of social network theory to talk about empires and such.Today's Washington Post points out thata growing body of evidence is suggesting that traditional social networks play a surprisingly powerful and underrecognized role in influencing how...