Elvis Duck because I'll be drinking Bourbon in Memphis tomorrow night. Julien Barnes-Dacey and Daniel Levy want de-escalation, not more arms for Syria Unintended consequences? The Syrian conflict has been good for American-Turkish relations. An "ancient" U.S....
If you are like me, you are pining for your next installment of Game of Thrones (and the Memorial Day week off was cruel, though not as cruel as the torment we have seen of late). In the meantime, I...
A handful of links today, but with content. Dan Drezner discusses China, Thucydides, and the limit of metaphor. It strikes me that Dan's buried the lede here. The question isn't whether Thucydides...
Some of our readers might be interested in this. Comes with a €2,500 prize. The GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies, Hamburg, has established itself as a centre of academic and research...
The conventional wisdom on the US presence in Asia is that we re-assure all players. Specifically, US allies don’t need to arms race local opponents, because the US has extended deterrence to cover them. Hence Japan and South Korea don’t need to go nuclear, for example. Among academics, this logic pops in the work of Christensen, Ikenberrry, and Nye; among policy analysts, here is the US military saying this, and here is the DC think-tank set. But there’s flip-side to this logic that really needs to be investigated – whether the US presence also freezes conflicts in place, by reassuring...
Here is your Thursday Morning Linkage. I'm going to start off with my usual conservation theme before turning to some other topics like a kerfuffle over mapping racial tolerance and the World Health Assembly (going on this week). Amphibians are in trouble all across the U.S. and world (disease, climate change, farm chemicals), along with bees and bats, nature is trying to tell us something Chinese bear bile farms are generating an uproar - in China! Fish have been moving to cooler water for decades in reaction to climate change Did you see the cross-national map of racial tolerance that lit...
It's so disorienting to be posting on a Wednesday! I'd like to begin with a bleg: I'm in the market for a platform that allows for easy screencasting. In other words, if you wanted to have 6 to 10 users simultaneously viewing a series of slides, but you thought that Google Hangout was just a little too laggy, what would you use? Comment below or email rpm47 atsign georgetown period edu. Via Inside Higher Ed, cell biologists slam the impact factor. Did a Fox News reporter hurt U.S. security by disclosing that Washington had a high-level DPRK mole? I thought this was the sort of thing...
Thanks to the patience of the former EJIR editorial team, PTJ and I will have an article in the forthcoming special issue on the "End of IR Theory?" Only the first 35-40% resembles the working paper (PDF) we posted at the Duck. Even the name has changed. We still argue in favor of thinking about international-relations theory as dealing with "scientific ontologies": "catalog[s]--or map[s]--of the basic substances and processes that constitute world politics." As we note in both the final version and the working paper, this includes: The actors that populate world politics, such as states,...
I am posting this now for two reasons: 1) I am going to be at a conference for the next few days and the hotel apparently lacks wifi! 2) it is the anniversary of Youtube, which has made much of Friday Nerd Blogging possible. So here is a tribute to the Youtube anniversary:
Greetings all. PM and I are switching linkage duty. Omar Ali looks at the 2013 Pakistani election at 3QD. Tom Nichols argues against US ambiguity on Iran and North Korea. Via Alana Tiemessen: international justice infographics from the Leitner Center (pdf). North Korean piracy and maritime disputes in Northeast Asia. Juan Cole on mounting sectarian violence in Iraq. The nexus between authoritarian rule, collective action, and disaster response in China. For more on strategies of divide-and-rule in modern empires territorially expansive composite states, see King et al. Tom Pepinsky's "Notes...
It may, however, be appropriate to point out that the persisting bipolar conflict in the  field between humanists and behavioralists conceals a lively polemic within both camps  and perhaps particularly among the so-called  behavioralists. Among the modernists neologisms burst like roman candles in the sky, and wars of epistemological legitimacy are fought. The devotees of rigor and theories of the middle range reject more speculative general theory as  non-knowledge; and the devotees of general theory attack those with more limited scope as technicians, as answerers in search of questions....
Good mornin'.  Here's your linkage... Paolo Sorbello critiques the elegantly fixed steps and rhythms of the last Waltz. Roger Mac Ginty at Plato's Cave discusses the construction of "greatness" in IR and the cult of followership. Thomas Meaney tries to explain why a passionate history of global alternatives to liberal capitalism becomes an exercise in nostalgia. Jason Ralph wonders if Headley Bull's Revolt Against the West thesis is appropriate for understanding contemporary international society. Oliver Steunkel asks: "Could the BRICS provide loans without conditionalities?" Siddharatha...