The Duck of Minerva

The following is a guest post by Sidra Hamidi, a PhD Candidate in Political Science at Northwestern University, specializing in global nuclear politics and state identity. She has published previously in the Washington Post  and E-International Relations.  In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election to the highest office in the United States, many observers have heralded the beginning of an era of “post-truth” in which “facts” are under attack from “opinions” at best and “lies” at worst. Oxford Dictionary named “post-truth” its word of the year, and Ruth Marcus even referred to “post-truth”...

It's always exciting to see articles on pop culture gracing the pages of mainstream political science journals. And it's always good to see international relations scholars being encouraged to engage more deeply with questions of gender in the course of their teaching. This issue of PS: Political Science and Politics gives us both: an article by Rebecca Susan Evans, taking Daniel Drezner to task for excluding feminist theories of international politics from his 2011 Theory of International Politics and Zombies: [Drezner's] light-hearted use of popular culture appeals to students, who...

This is a guest post by Tobias T. Gibson,  Associate Professor of Political Science and Security Studies at Westminster College, in Fulton, MO. Late last month, a U.S. military “drone” killed Mullah Mansour, the leader of the Taliban. Because the drone was operated by the Department of Defense, the Obama administration was quick to claim the death of such an internationally contentious figure. Publicly, the administration commented that Mansour offered a “continuing, imminent threat” to United States soldiers in the region, and specifically targeted U.S. and allied soldiers. Killing Mansour,...

This is a guest post by Janina Dill, Assistant Professor at the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics and a Research Fellow at the Center for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on international law and ethics in international relations, specifically in war. She is the author of “Legitimate Targets? Social Construction, International Law and US Bombing."   “She may be a small person, but she has big ideas,” states the panel chair by way of introducing one of the most impressive senior scholars in security...

At Foreign Policy, CFR's Micah Zenko has examined the best civilian casualty data available for both manned airstrikes and drone strikes between 2009-2015 and concluded, pretty damningly, that "Drones Kill More Civilians Than Pilots Do." According to the best publicly available evidence, drone strikes in non-battlefield settings — Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia — result in 35 times more civilian fatalities than airstrikes by manned weapons systems in conventional battlefields, such as Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. There are sound arguments that can be made in favor of U.S. drone strikes, but...

I have a new article up this morning at Washington Post's Monkey Cage,  responding to those who have previously tried to classify Bernie Sanders as a "pacifist" (Krauthammer who calls his view "part swords-into-plowshares utopianism, part get-thee-gone isolationism") or alternatively as a "realist" (Katrina vanden Heuvel , likening Sanders' to Obama vis a vis Clinton's more hawkish liberal internationalism).  Many have argued he actually doesn't have a foreign policy position. I argue Sanders' vision has been hard to understand and articulate because it defies conventional labels. And it's...

On April Fool's Day, Presidential Candidate Bernie Sanders did an interview with the New York Daily News, perceived by many to have been a botched performance.  Yesterday, the New York Daily News followed up with a piece entitled "Bernie Sanders Doesn't Know Enough About Foreign Policy, Pros Say."  (The 'pros' cited  were not some representative sample of beltway illuminatis but rather various Clinton foreign policy advisers who will reportedly be circulating a letter saying as much in the next days.) As an IR educator I'm delighted that foreign affairs is looming large in a national primary...

  This is a guest post by Juergen Altmann and Frank Sauer. Juergen Altmann is a Researcher and Lecturer at Technische Universität Dortmund, a specialist in military technology and preventive arms control and among the first scholars to study the military uses of nanotechnology. Frank Sauer is a Senior Research Fellow and Lecturer, Bundeswehr University Munich, a specialist in international security, and is the author of Atomic Anxiety: Deterrence, Taboo and the Non-Use of U.S. Nuclear Weapons. Autonomous weapon systems: rarely has an issue gained the attention of the international arms...

An argument broke out about this question after the "Star Wars and International Security" panel at ISA this month. A few people on Twitter and PSRM (or so rumors have it) say dressing up renders pop culture research more marginal than it already is. I suppose a TRIP survey could more conclusively answer the question about trends in the discipline. Personally, I'd love to see that survey, since my new article in Perspectives is all about science fiction and global politics, so I have skin in the game of "taking pop culture research seriously." In fact, perhaps we can conduct a natural...

I was among those last week, after hearing about the events in Brussels, who tweeted or Facebooked in solidarity with Belgium... but also in solidarity with civilians killed in Ankara, Baghdad, Yemen, later that week Cote d'Ivoire and (as of yesterday) in Lahore, Pakistan. I took some flak for this on Twitter and in my personal email. Why can't we just focus on Belgium on a week like this? some people ask? Don't you care about this country and its allies? they say. I do, of course, but I also care about accuracy in my contributions to the media discourse, and about not helping the...