A story in the New York Times this morning suggests that the National Security Agency has been analyzing our social networks through email and phone call records, apparently accomplishing “large-scale graph analysis on very large sets of communications metadata” of...
Perhaps the first Monkey Cage post at the Washington Post presents some numbers that show that policy-makers tend not to like the higher tech kind of poli sci (or theory) We knew this from previous...
Michael Desch and Daniel Philpott at Notre Dame have concluded their two-year Mellon funded working group on religion and IR and published their final report titled Religion and International...
Action on Armed Violence is circulating some terrific info-graphs and advocacy videos documenting civilian harms from various conventional weapons in Syria: By even the most cautious estimates,...
[Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Guzman Castro of the University of Pennsylvania. This post refers to an article and post in the European Journal of International Relations-Duck of Minerva symposium on "The End of International Relations Theory?"by Christian Reus-Smit and the corresponding post by Milja Kurki.] Christian Reus-Smit's and Milja Kurki's interventions in the EJIR symposium are part of a laudable mission to defend meta-theory from the “activists for our emancipation from meta-theory.” The “activists” in this case turn out to be the duo of Sil and Katzenstein in their...
Having been invited to offer an ‘overall response’ to this special issue, I decided to take a look at how the contributors deal with the editors’ claim that we are witnessing the end of ‘IR Theory’. But let me preface this with an observation. The EJIR editors’ decision to compile this special issue, taken at the 2011 ISA conference in Montreal, occurred parallel to the creation of the ISA Theory Section (in which I was closely involved). While this was not a consciously coordinated effort, neither was it a coincidence. Both initiatives were motivated by a similar concern, namely a...
We have all quit from time to time. Choosing when to quit and move on is tough proposition, especially for researchers. I never really thought much about the issue and how it relates to our work until Dave Chappelle brought it home for me recently. I saw his set on the Funny or Die tour during APSA weekend in Chicago. I just had to go; I can only take so many nerdy conversations. Of course Dave Chappelle is famous for quitting his show. Many say he walked out on $50 million dollars plus a litany of other accusations. He maintains he just had to get away. That $50 million was never on the...
Brief but important interview with Andrew Gelman. Here's one thing regarding "great applied work": Ask yourself the question: What makes a statistician look like a hero? You might think that the answer would be, Extracting a small faint signal from noise. But I don't think so. I think that a statistician looks like a hero by studying large effects. A history of the firebomb:The effects testing, done very carefully by both universities (Harvard again, along with the University of Chicago), corporations (Standard Oil, Texas Company), and the military (Ordnance Department) are also pretty grim....
Peter Campbell and Michael Desch write in Foreign Affairs that the National Research Council's rankings of political science departments are systematically biased against international relations scholarship and against policy-relevant scholarship: The NRC’s methodology biased its rankings against two kinds of scholarship: international relations scholarship, which is often book-oriented; and policy-relevant scholarship, which often appears in non-peer-reviewed journals. That leads to vast undervaluation of many leading scholars and, accordingly, their schools. As an illustration, the late...
“In the Beginning” joins a growing literature – including my own Recovering International Relations – in which normative claims regarding the vocation of IR theory are tied to an historical account of its disciplinary emergence.* If these arguments vary in their details, they share a common logical-rhetorical tactic. An account of the discipline’s beginnings is mobilized to critique present-day scholarly practices: to spur “reflection on where one is, and where one is going.” On Williams’ account, a basic confusion regarding IR-realism’s relationship to liberalism characterizes “where...
From its very inception IR was a substantive normative and political project.
The Navy Yard in DC came under fire this morning. Developing. 9/11 Anniversary commentary of note: Tom Junod on the sanitization of disaster footage. Dan Nexon's original thoughts on this are always worth a re-read. Reframing the anniversary by conservatives (Benghazi) and human rights activists (Santiago). So President Assad pledged to accede to the Chemical Weapons Convention. Yochi Dreazon on why this is no magic bullet. Kevin Jon Heller says Syria is the winner here. Assad seems to agree. Romeo Dallaire, former Head of the UN Mission to Rwanda who witnessed the slaughter and begged the...