Yet another page in the continuing saga of the Secret Raid on they Syrian Reactor that maybe never was....As many loyal Duck readers know, I've been following this story with fascination since it broke. To recap: Israel bombs a "site" in Syria, Syria says nothing, 3rd...
Pundits have frequently compared the 2008 election to 1980. In both elections, the opposition party fielded strong candidates in the face of an unpopular president brought down by economic...
Peter recently urged me to report from the Pittsburgh grassroots on the Pennsylvania primary. Well, word from Frick International Studies Academy in Pittsburgh is that middle-schoolers are split on...
Last week, in the much-maligned Democratic debate in Pennsylvania, Senator Hillary Clinton said that she would greatly expand the US nuclear umbrella in the Middle East: Well, in fact, George...
Recently, my graduate IR seminar addressed critical theory -- and we naturally contrasted critical theory to "problem-solving theory," as Robert Cox would have it.In a volume about Cox's contributions to IR, Timothy Sinclair draws the distinction (pp. 5-6): It is the action, not the limits of the system, that is the analytic focus of of problem solving. Critical theory steps outside the confines of the existing set of relationships to identify the origins and developmental potential of these phenomenon. While problem solving theory assumes the functional coherence of existing phenomenon,...
Daniel Little has a wonderful project instantiated in his website "UnderstandingSociety ChangingSociety" aimed at providing resources for those interested in social processes and social change. He's collected a number of interviews with prominent figures. I've watched the one with Charles Tilly, which is really a remarkable interview with a remarkable scholar and intellectual. I highly recommend that readers of the Duck take a look, particularly those of you in academia or thinking of going that route. The first part of what turns out to be a very long discussion is below. Although I've...
Matthew Yglesias calls our attention to Todd Gitlin's quick summary of Robert Kagan's book excerpt in The New Republic. Kagan's book is prefigured in his same-titled Policy Review essay, "End of Dreams, Return of History," which I blogged about some time ago.Matt points out the most important point: if we treat what might be called "the great game, but now with new globalization sauce" as a titanic struggle between liberal democracy and "new wave" authoritarianism, we're likely to make it so. This is pretty obviously a bad idea, because countries like Russia and China have plenty of existing...
Could be my lack of expertise in Chinese diplomatic discourse, but I've found myself doing double-takes at the frequency with which Chinese elites have referred to "feelings" in statements to the Western media lately. Take Gao Xiqing's interview on 60 Minutes Sunday. Pressed by Leslie Stahl on whether the Chinese should submit to an official code of conduct for sovereign wealth funds, he responds: "Why do you need a law like that? That law will only hurt feelings. It's not economic. It doesn't make sense. Politically it's stupid."Then, on last night's News Hour, when asked whether the...
"With this administration, if a passenger blows up a plane, it's a failure in the war on terror. But if the plane just blows up on its own — eh, it's the market self-regulating."Click here to stream the full bit.I watched this on my DVR and thought, gee, I ought to post it. But Kevin Drum beat me too it, hat tip to him.
I have found an interesting counter-example to my earlier lament about disciplinary norms restricting open reflection by IR scholars about their personal trajectory and history as it relates to their work. It is Robert Keohane's recent interview on UC-Berkeley's "Conversations with History" series in which he expounds the myriad personal, cultural, social influences that have informed and shaped his research.Keohane's willingness to expound on his personal relationship to his subject matter is not limited to public interviews, of course, but constituted a chapter in his book International...
Stanley Fish uses a review of the forthcoming book “French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States” (University of Minnesota Press) to provide (what I think is a) very good summary of the debates and issues raised by what we in IR have come to call the Linguistic Turn in epistemology and resulting IR theory. This morning I was teaching discourse analysis in my Intro to Research Methods course, and trying to articulate the different views of language that Fish locates at the center of the debate on French Theory. So, when I sat down...
This week, as part of my "Theory and Beer" meeting with doctoral students, we considered Michael Gilligan's thought-provoking formal theory article on the International Criminal Court, published two years ago in International Organization.Gilligan uses a formal model to "test" whether the International Criminal Court can be an effective judicial institution given that it has no police arm and, as is so clear with respect to Darfur, cannot force states to extradite indictees. His argument in a nutshell: "Although the institution has no enforcement power, some leaders (those with such a high...