Random Friday stuff

13 May 2011, 2136 EDT

Blogger has finally started to restore posts, but it doesn’t look like everything is back yet. Meanwhile, my partner’s off to Kazakhstan, I’ve got 38 seminar papers and 16 short essays to grade, and my daughter’s become obsessed with Naruto. So, in lieu of posting anything substantive:

Rob Farley has some thoughts on the air campaign in Libya;
PM’s thoughts on qualitative and quantitative methods deserves more commentary from our academic readers;
Al Jazeera chronicles how Saudia Arabia’s new protectorate, the Bahrain’s government, is using its Arab Spring crackdown to systematically destroy rival centers of power;
Phil Arena’s three posts on “Rational Choice Apologetics” lay out an important defense of his favored approach–if ~~PTJ~~ someone here doesn’t take the bait, I figure I’ll at least have to write something on the “Tyranny of Soft Rationalism in IR Theory”;
Five months in and I’m still really liking the Decemberist’s The King is Dead;
My aforementioned partner just finished John Courtenay Grimwood’s Pashazade, and endorses it as much as I do — and because it’s something like six years old, you don’t have to wait for Grimwood to finish the trilogy; and
Grading Interstellar Relations final papers reminds me how Iain M. Banks returned to form with Surface Detail.

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.