The Duck of Minerva

Nerd-Inflected Wednesday Linkage

Featured

by Dan Nexon

24 April 2013, 0936 EDT

sitting ducks

  • The difference between pets in Diablo III and Torchlight II.
  • Blah blah blah Game of Thrones blah blah credible commitments blah blah blah prisoners’ dilemma.
  • Taylor Fravel says that China hasn’t abandoned no-first use.
  • Pavel Podvig demolishes “SDI ended the Cold War” claptrap. Key graf: “The evolution of the Soviet attitudes toward SDI suggests that the main factor that contributed to the ending the confrontation of the Cold War was the willingness of the United States and the Soviet Union to engage in a dialogue on reduction of their nuclear forces. The only result that the SDI program was able to achieve in the context of confrontation was to embolden those in the Soviet Union who defined security in confrontational terms and benefited from this kind of understanding.”

And also:

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.

2 Comments

  1. LFC
    LFC on 24 April 2013 at 10.23 EDT

    Re your last link, Gray’s piece on Marx: Gray’s statement that were it not for a few historical accidents Marx’s name would be “one which educated people struggle to remember” is absurd. Marx had some profound insights, as Gray himself acknowledges, and Marx was also, at times, a gifted writer. He would be read today even if WW1 and the Russian Revolution had not happened.

    As for Sperber’s point that “all that is solid melts into air” is a bad translation from the German, that horse left the barn a long time ago. Generations of students who read Marx in translation remember that passage from the Manifesto, and another book on Marx, whatever its merits, is not going to change their recollection. And as Gray points out, Sperber’s ‘more accurate’ translation of that passage basically means the same thing as the familiar version.

  2. Vikash Yadav
    Vikash Yadav on 24 April 2013 at 11.04 EDT

    By definition, everything at the Duck is nerd-inflected… Just sayin’