Why?

17 May 2005, 2210 EDT

Because everyone is doing it. I mean everyone. Even John Ikenberry is going to be blogging at TPMCafe.com.¹ Plus, all the cool kids are non-anonymous now.²

Who am I? I’m an Assistant Professor in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. My official webpage is pretty spare, but it does have a picture of me looking kind of ‘old-school Jewish socialist’ in Copenhagen. In 2005-2006 I’ll be a fellow at the Mershon Institute at Ohio State University.

I have a doctorate in Political Science from Columbia University. I majored in International Relations and minored in Political Theory. Most of my work is in International Relations Theory, and I tend to study historical international politics, which means I lack the kind of expertise that translates well into commentary on daily events. It makes sense, therefore, for this blog to be occasional in nature [update: now that the Duck is a collective, that looks unlikely…]. Since I’m not tenured, and have a lot of academic work to do, that seems about right to me.

My politics are, when push comes to shove, New Deal Liberal. Most of the time I struggle to reconcile my social-democratic and libertarian tendencies, which is no small task.

I once described my views on foreign policy as “New Republic”-ish. I am less of a liberal hawk than I used to be, in no small measure thanks to the rise of neconservativism. I have developed grave doubts about aggressive democracy promotion, yet I remain very much in favor of humanitarian interventions, especially in the face of genocide. At the same time, I find myself increasingly drawn to international-political realism. We’ll see how this all turns out.

I enjoy speculative fiction, a wide variety of music, and I am a casual follower of Major League Baseball. Yes, I am a nerd… but a proud one.³

¹My wife suggests that blogging has now “jumped the shark.” What she means is that blogs were once like the early world wide web – a place to find cool and different stuff – but are now turning into the adolescent world wide web. Blogs are increasingly a distribution system for experts, journalists, and other aspects of conventional media; alternatively, they are hubs for traditional on-line communities (e.g., Daily Kos).
²Yes, I do have an anonymous blog. No, I’m not telling.
³My book chapter on the Borg and American foreign policy is cited in the Wikipedia.

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.