Brandon Valeriano

The Scottish Threat Environment: Insecurity, Fears and Independence

by Brandon Valeriano | 23 December, 2013 | Featured

This article is cross posted from the Scottish Global Forum. In this form it is slightly modified and hyperlinked. The Nature of Threats to Scotland In March of 2015, a cry goes out in the town centre, everyone reacts quickly. Valuables are hidden underground; women and children are stored in hideaways to be kept safe until the danger is over. The sacred and expensive items in the church are removed and the priests flee – they are often the first targeted. The town moves to the defenses, but there is little that they can do to counter the oncoming scourge. The Vikings are off the coast...

Cyber Shrinkage: Loss and Cyber Security

by Brandon Valeriano | 10 December, 2013 | Featured

The nature of cyber discourse concerns me, and this is a point I have written about extensively with Ryan Maness (Valeriano and Maness 2012a, Valeriano and Maness 2012b, Valeriano and Maness 2014). The idea is that threats we see materialize from cyberspace seem to vastly outweigh any other threats we have faced, ever. Some argue this cyber threat is different, faster, and bigger. I question this conventional wisdom. Is the cyber threat really any different than any other threat we have faced? To this point, I have generally avoided writing about cyber-crime, but the logic suggesting...

Cyber Arms Proliferation and Arms Races

by Brandon Valeriano | 6 December, 2013 | Featured

With the assumption of an ongoing global cyber arms race, Western governments signed an agreement to limit the sharing and selling of dangerous cyber technologies. David Livingstone notes, “[Cyber security technology] is a lot like the arms race. What you want to do is slow down how fast your foe develops equivalent technologies.” This is an important and needed step in the cyber discourse and I look forward to reading the details of how exactly these governments plan to limit the transfer of cyber technologies. The process might not be as difficult as one would expect given that computer...

Academia, Drug Cartels, and Inappropriate Analogies

by Brandon Valeriano | 27 November, 2013 | Featured

Given the intricacies of our job and the cushy lifestyle most academics live in, it disconcerting when academics use improper and incorrect analogies to describe the intricacies of their job. The latest is the idea that drug cartels and academia are similar enterprises. While I understand the spirit of the idea, the basic assumptions are insensitive and damaging. They represent the the pondering of a privileged academic stuck in the ivory tower. Working for a drug cartel, being involved in a gang, or participating in organized crime is not a glamorous lifestyle. This should be an obvious...

An ExPat Academic Thanksgiving

by Brandon Valeriano | 25 November, 2013 | Featured

It is time for an academic Thanksgiving (at least it is for me, flew home early because it was Reading Week in the UK), that time of year when we give thanks for when our ancestral academic Deans fed us when we were hungry. Something like that...cornucopia with grants, laptops, and travel funds. Who knows how it all started. Still, it is that time of year we all reflect on what we are thankful for. So what am I thankful for, as an academic? For one, I am thankful for Laura Sjoberg's contributions to the Duck of Minerva. She has not been posting regularly for some time but her...

Desecuritization and Iran

by Brandon Valeriano | 7 November, 2013 | Featured

It is shocking how little attention Iran’s recent efforts to satisfy the international community’s demands on nuclear question have received in the news media and academic discourse. As I write this, there are 1182 related news stories on news.google.com related to Rob Ford’s struggles with the crack cocaine and only 85 related to Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Prepping for my graduate course on IR Theory, it struck me how little we talk about the process of desecuritization. The securitization process is well covered, we often are able to analyse, describe, and deconstruction the process...

Duck and Cover when Cyber Doomsday Comes

by Brandon Valeriano | 28 October, 2013 | Featured

“The current blackout is a result of a cyber attack” “It will happen” Ominous words from the National Geographic channel and their premier movie this weekend. Not really sure how the news reporter can still report given the aforementioned blackout, and also not sure why toilets cease to work when you lose power, but the point is taken. We are all at the mercy of roving mobs of vigilantes because of the dangers of a cyber attack. I am counting the days until Western developed countries encourage people to duck and cover, like they did during the Cold War in the event of nuclear attacks, to...

So you want to move to the United Kingdom…

by Brandon Valeriano | 24 October, 2013 | Featured

Its 2013, the U.S. government was recently shut down for almost two weeks. The National Science Foundation will only fund grants if you can help the U.S. build operational transformers or drones that can make targeted killing choices. The movement to replace full time faculty with part time adjuncts has sapped the open jobs on the market leading to the common Facebook refrain - "worst job market ever." Political theory is openly despised in most departments. Without significant skills in R, there is little hope to make an impact in quantitative research. Welcome to the Political Science...

The Birth of a Sports Rivalry

by Brandon Valeriano | 17 October, 2013 | Featured

How do we communicate ideas to our audience? What steps can we take to introduce advanced concepts to our students or the general public? Scholars work for decades on the content of their arguments but spend very little time thinking about how to translate their ideas for specific consumers of information. In Phil Arena’s review of Braumoeller’s new excellent book, he makes a baseball reference, later noting that he does not even like sports. This is a typical tactic in Political Science, if not all of academia. We often make sports metaphors and analogies in order to push our point...

Flying While Academic

by Brandon Valeriano | 2 October, 2013 | Featured

Changing apartments last weekend really brought home the fact that I have been flying way too much lately. I counted 18 long haul toothbrushes and countless little mini toothpaste tubes. If you need earplugs and sleep masks, I am your man. The odd thing about flying as an academic is that I just was not doing it right till recently. We spend lots of time diving deep into our chosen research topics, but very little time exploring the things that might improve the quality of our lives. As academics, we often fly a lot to conferences, meetings, and school visits, but take whatever flight is...

The Duck of Minerva