Much of the discourse about the recent UK local elections had to do with the decline of Labour under Keir Starmer and the worrisome rise of the far-right Reform Party. This is obviously important, but the outcome in Scotland’s parliamentary elections may have just as...
I've had four potential posts on Israel, anti-Israel actions and antisemitism this week. As new events occur, the old post falls to the wayside. I was stuck on whether I should pick one, or try to...
Labour MP David Lammy has a new piece in Foreign Affairs called, “The Case for Progressive Realism.” Where his manifesto is punchiest is in its unsparing critiques of British foreign policy: the...
Scotland's independence drive won't disappear anytime soon. In "Scots Wha Hae," (from which the title of this post comes) Robert Burns calls on Scots to remember their victory over the English at...
Earlier this week, a boat carrying migrants fleeing Afghanistan sank in the English Channel, killing six. Earlier this month, 41 died after a ship sailing from Tunisia sank near Italy. There are many more examples of such tragedies I could point to, and, sadly, there will be many more in the future. These are not acts of God, like hurricanes or earthquakes. They are created, both through the conflict and repression producing the crises and the inaction of those who could protect these people. Long-serving Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte recently announced he would leave politics after his...
This week, King Charles had a second coronation in Scotland, following the official one in London. He took part in a parade through Edinburgh and received the Scottish crown jewels in St. Giles Cathedral. While this was not technically necessary, as England and Scotland share the same throne, it indicated his desire to unify Great Britain and increase his standing among Scots. They were, as the New York Times reported, "ambivalent." While many appeared to cheer the parade, many others protested. Charles is not polling very well in Scotland, where his mother seemed rather popular. What was...
When I was a grad student, I had the privilege of student teaching with political theorist Eric MacGilvray. Eric was—and I’m sure still is—a brilliant teacher. He was always in motion, but in a way that felt deliberate. He often perched on an elevated windowsill while listening to students debate amongst themselves. He made even the most archaic and dense texts accessible. (The class was Classics of Social and Political Thought.) He also had a unique approach to grading. Rather than marking on a scale of 100, where 94 is an A, he introduced a seven-point scale. Actually, it was a ten-point...
Four years ago I accepted a job at a university in the UK. When I took the job I didn’t think a whole lot about how working in the UK might differ from my previous academic posts in the US. I’m an American, and though I have British friends who work at UK universities--one of whom warned me “not to be fooled by the fact that we speak the same language”--I was woefully underprepared for just how distinct the two higher education systems are. Brits and Americans do speak the same language, but there are significant differences in their use of terminology. It’s not just that we use different...
Like everyone else, I'm still trying to catch up after the Thanksgiving holiday. So I have a quick, kind of speculative post this week. It looks like the distressing saga of Matthew Hedges has finally been resolved. As I wrote about before, Hedges is a grad student in the UK who traveled to the UAE to conduct field work. After interviewing several subjects about UAE security policies, he was arrested and charged with espionage. He was recently been sentenced to life in prison, although the UAE just pardoned him. There is a lot to figure out with this case--what it means for scholars working...
I have been able to avoid this fate for almost 12 years now, but they finally got me. Being a citizen of Germany, I have been studying in the U.S. on student visas for the last decade and even though it has always been a bureaucratic nightmare, associated with significant financial costs, I usually managed to obtain the necessary documents to enter the United States. Until this summer, when the application for my work visa got delayed for reasons that I don’t need to get into here. Long story short, I had to leave the U.S. for three months, organize someone to sublet my apartment on very...
Its 2013, the U.S. government was recently shut down for almost two weeks. The National Science Foundation will only fund grants if you can help the U.S. build operational transformers or drones that can make targeted killing choices. The movement to replace full time faculty with part time adjuncts has sapped the open jobs on the market leading to the common Facebook refrain - "worst job market ever." Political theory is openly despised in most departments. Without significant skills in R, there is little hope to make an impact in quantitative research. Welcome to the Political Science...
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...