Monday Morning Linkage

20 August 2012, 1313 EDT

Jonathan Rue discusses the continuing wave of “green-on-blue” attacks in Afghanistan.
Sertaç Sehlikoglu-Karakas on the Olympics, “sporting bodies,” and Islam.
Dan Trombly argues that the Colombian counter-insurgency effort contradicts COIN conventional wisdom.
Jamestown China Brief: “Taiwan Rebalances in the Near Seas.”
Jay doesn’t think much of the role of “legitimacy” in causal explanations: “In statistical terms, legitimacy is the label we attach to the residual, the portion of the variance our mental models cannot explain. It is a tautology masquerading as a causal force.” Sounds like good fodder for some Duck to tackle, no?
Ocasional guest poster Erica Chenoweth flogs her American Sociological Review article (PDF) on how Israeli concessions are more effective at reducing Palestinian terrorist attacks. This would be a good time to congratulate Erica and her co-author, Maria Stephan, for winning the Woodrow Wilson Award — perhaps the most prestigious book award in political science.
More Lovecraft love.

Dan Nexon

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.