Morning Linkage

22 July 2012, 1519 EDT

Conor Friedersdorf argues that R2P is a decision for Congress to make, not the Executive Branch.
Laura at 11d has advice from big student loan debtors. Note the part about not getting an MA that serves little professional purpose.
Daniel Little has a very nice post on Chuck Tilly’s Durable Inequality and the growing income gap in the United States.
Sandy Levinson makes an impassioned plea for putting gun control back on the table.
A note on “Aurora” and gun control: my basic view is that we’re so swamped with guns that I don’t see much point in most restrictions. But telling people not to discuss the relationship among guns, violence, and public policy after a mass murderer opens fire in a crowded theater strikes me as, well, idiotic.
Rita Abrahamsen on what the Olympics tell us about the dangers of private security.
Kindred argues that the Fed’s failure to act derives from political constraints and points to Republicans pressing Bernake not to take additional action to stimulate the economy. The question remains, however, what mechanisms translates that pressure into constraint?
Kieran Healy follows up his earlier post with data and charts on the distribution of assault deaths in the United States.
Emmanuel at International Political Economy Zone has some cutting things to say about Yale’s venture in Singapore.
My natural-gas backup generator has seen a lot of use lately. Here’s David Silbey’s July 11 piece explaining why that’s not an indicator of the decline and fall of the American Empire.
In the excellent questions department, “Why is political science the only social science field to have an institutionalized sub-field of ethics inside of it?“

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.