Anne Harrington and Jacqueline (Jill) Hazelton take center stage in the inaugural G&T episode.
Duck Podcast G&T series episode 1: Power, realism, and the politics of IR Academia
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realist theory
Mirror, Mirror upon the Wall — Who is the Realist of them All?
Despite Adam Elkus's prodding, I avoided participating in the first-round beat down of Paul J. Saunders supremely stupid essay, "Giving Realists a Bad Name." That's okay, because Daniel Larison, Dan...
Clashing Networks and Foreign Policy
Anne Marie Slaughter and Dan Drezner had an interesting debate last week on the role of nonstate actors in foreign policy. AMS stakes out a “modern/liberal-social” position highlighting the role of...
Random Thought
Modern realist theory contains no arguments (of significance) absent in the writings of Niccolò Machiavelli or Francisco Guicciardini.
More realist theory Posts
Zombie NATO? Or, the Poverty of Realism
A great many bloggers and policy wonks, motivated by the upcoming Lisbon Summit, are weighing in on NATO's future. NATO faces a number of challenges and difficult issues, including:The inconclusive war in Afghanistan that has led member after member to reduce (or eliminate) its commitment to ISAF;Whether to take on a missile defense as part of a broader "territorial defense" mandate;The future of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe;Continuing divisions over how to engage the Russian Federation; Turkey's growing "neo-Ottoman" focus; andRecession-driven defense cuts that threaten to eviscerate...
Wilson’s legacy
Duck readers may recall that just over two years ago Charli posted about an interesting and provocative Deborah Boucoyannis article arguing that realist notions of the balance-of-power are actually liberal ideas about checks-and-balances. The post generated a lot of comments (which apparently cannot be linked under the new software), including a fairly long and somewhat critical one from Duck founder Dan Nexon. Despite the flaws he noted, Dan nonetheless wrote that "the argument...is persuasive; she's made a very important contribution, at a minimum, in arguing that the 'balance of power' is...
The World According to Realists or, “Never Go In Against a Sicilian When Death is On the Line”
In World Politics yesterday we covered the Peloponnesian War, the Melian Dialogue, and the security dilemma as an introduction to realist theory. Students played a version of the 2-person non-iterated prisoner's dilemma game developed by my former professor Robert Darst, with the winners receiving candy and the person with the lowest possible grade receiving an extra credit point toward their final grade. The students learned that the incentive structure in the game is a powerful causal variable affecting outcomes: when the game is structured so as to reward rational, self-interested...