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 Relations: A Primer for Research. Desch, in his introduction (titled: "The...
“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...
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...
Syria: Richard Betts cuts to the core of Obama's challenge on Syria: "To the extent that any policy is strategically sensible, it is unlikely to be politically palatable; to the extent that a policy can be accepted as politically legitimate, it is unlikely to be of much strategic merit." I can't see how Obama is going to secure Congressional support -- here are the latest numbers. Here are some numbers on public opinion from around the world. Samantha Powers' comments yesterday at the UN. Richard Price thinks the chemical weapons taboo will hold without a strike. Memories of Kosovo:...
Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Tim Dunne, Lene Hansen and Colin Wight. It is the first installment in our "End of IR Theory" companion symposium for the special issue of the European Journal of International Relations. SAGE has temporarily ungated all of the articles in that issue. This post refers to the issue's introduction of the same name (PDF). A response, authored by Inanna Hamati-Ataya, will appear at 10am Eastern. Other entries in the symposium--when available--may be reached via the "EJIR Special Issue Symposium" tag. In an academic discipline as wide-ranging as...
I am scheduling this for Friday, as I think that mid-APSA is the best time for some Star Wars medley mash. I could be wrong, of course.
Among the more famous anti-war slogans in the US is the 1960s' declaration of "make love, not war." I found myself thinking about that phrase when a student sent me a link to the Daily Show on Monday - where Jon Stewart made some insightful comments about sex, gender, and the presumably impending military action in Syria. And yes, I used the words "insightful comments" to describe something Jon Stewart said. Those of you who know me know how hard that was to say. But his description works for me .... and suggests that "make love not war" is actually a false dichotomy. After playing a group...
It's morning somewhere right? With military action possibly pending in Syria amidst a horrible ongoing civil war, I needed a more hopeful photo to accompany this post of news links (hence the duck and the kitten). But, the news out there is pretty grim so here are some links on Syria, the links between drought and the war in Syria, climate change and violence, and what happened to Al Gore on climate change. Aaron David Miller makes the case that Obama had to go to Congress and made a virtue out of necessity Under these circumstances, Obama has been risk-averse not because he's flawed,...
It is with great pleasure that I announce the start of a special collaboration among the European Journal of International Relations, SAGE Journals, and the Duck of Minerva: The "End of IR Theory" Symposium. A number of developments over the past few years spurred Colin Wight, Lene Hansen, and Tim Dunne to dedicate a special issue of EJIR to the subject of the state of International Relations (IR) theory. If all goes smoothly, that issue has been released and will be ungated for the next month. The Duck of Minerva is publishing a companion symposium. Our aim? To spur discussion, provoke...
To help offset the departure of two permanent contributors, we would like to welcome a few extra additions to our guest blogging pool. Burcu Ayten Bayram is Assistant Professor at University of Texas-Arlington, specializing in international organizations, political psychology, identities and global justice. She works with quantitative methods including survey and experimental methods. Her current research project examines when and why decision-makers develop a sense of obligation towards international law and how this fidelity to law shapes their compliance preferences. When not researching,...
The intuition behind the maxim divide et impera is clear. If they're busy fighting each other, they not fighting you. And that's obviously in your interest (assuming, that is, you are some sort of occupier or metropole seeking to extract rents from a local population.) Devious and underhanded? Sure. Morally repugnant? If you're inclined to view politics through such a lens. But effective? Self-evidently. Or so you might think. Brenton Kenkel, a University of Rochester doctoral student currently on fellowship at Princeton, argues otherwise in this fascinating working paper. To...