The Duck of Minerva

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.

Recent Posts

The Korea Analogy

The Korea Analogy

by Dan Nexon | 15 March, 2022 | , ,

Recent chatter about David Remnick's interview of Stephen Kotkin reminds me of another interview that Kotkin recorded in February. Kotkin draws an analogy between Putin's decision to invade Ukraine and Stalin's decision to give Kim Il-sung the "green light" to invade South Korea in 1950. The comparison not only highlights the dysfunctions of personalist regimes, but the (potential) effects of the Russo-Ukraine War on U.S. foreign policy. Back in January, Gregory Mitrovich published an excellent piece about that in The Washington Post. Though the Cold War had begun several years before the...

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Are States Conscious? A Symposium 

Are States Conscious? A Symposium 

by Dan Nexon | 7 February, 2022 | ,

Way back in the summer I commissioned a symposium on Adam Lerner's provocative 2021 International Theory (vol. 13, no 2: 260-286) article, "What's it Like to be a State? An Argument for State Consciousness." Questions of consciousness pervade the social sciences. Yet, despite persistent tendencies to anthropomorphize states, most International Relations scholarship implicitly adopts the position that humans are conscious and states are not. Recognizing that scholarly disagreement over fundamental issues prevents answering definitively whether states are truly conscious, I instead demonstrate...

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In Memoriam: Jon Western

In Memoriam: Jon Western

by Dan Nexon | 31 January, 2022 | ,

Back in the Duck of Minerva's heyday, Jon Western was one of its anchors. Indeed, it wasn't that long ago that we were talking about his returning. Jon said that he'd gained important perspective on the state of higher education from his time as dean of faculty and vice president for academic affairs at Mount Holyoke. He wanted to share that with a broader audience. That won't happen. Jon died on Saturday. I don't have the details. Just a forwarded email from Mount Holyoke. It reads: Dear members of the Mount Holyoke community,It is with the utmost sorrow that I write to say that, yesterday,...

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Ban the “Failed Search”?

Ban the “Failed Search”?

by Dan Nexon | 30 January, 2022 |

How do colleges and universities go about hiring tenure-line (or the equivalent) faculty in politics and international relations? Back in 2013, I provided a short overview of the typical U.S. process: Starting in the late summer, political-science departments post position announcements with the American Political Science Association. Most job hunters read those announcements on e-jobs and decide whether or not to apply.Prospective hires send in materials to institutions. These typically include: (1) at least one writing sample -- sometimes a published article, sometimes an...

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Some Quick Notes

Some Quick Notes

by Dan Nexon | 22 January, 2022 | ,

Happy belated New Year! After a rather chaotic December – and lots of work on the backend of this site – we're getting ready to kickstart happenings here at the Duck. We've got a few posts and a symposium – all of which really should've been posted a while back – coming soon. You may already have seen that Adam has created a new "interviews" feature, and posted the first part of one he did with PTJ. I'm looking forward to seeing how that turns out. I've also changed the way that I access the main Duck of Minerva email account. In the process I've discovered that I've missed a lot of...

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Robert Jervis

Robert Jervis

by Dan Nexon | 10 December, 2021 | ,

As many of our readers have likely already heard, Robert Jervis died yesterday. The field has lost a gentle intellectual giant. Unlike many of my friends from Columbia, Bob wasn't on my dissertation committee; I only took one course from him. But I'll remember him as both brilliant and very generous. Indeed, back in November I received an email from a student in my "International Order" class. He was very excited because the Robert Jervis had agreed to a 45-minute interview over Zoom. The student had no idea, of course, that Bob was sick – and yet still took the time to speak to a college...

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And Lo, the Heavens Parted to Reveal an Article on Bad Habits to Avoid in Academic Writing

And Lo, the Heavens Parted to Reveal an Article on Bad Habits to Avoid in Academic Writing

by Dan Nexon | 8 October, 2021 | ,

If you’ve written a guest post for the Duck of Minerva recently, or published a piece at International Studies Quarterly while I was editor, you know that I really hate “heavy noun phrases.” Scholars seem to really like using them. I don’t know why. Perhaps they think it makes their writing sound more sophisticated. There’s an article at PS which is good at diagnosing the problem (but offers bad fixes).

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Liberal Order Beyond Neoliberalism

Liberal Order Beyond Neoliberalism

by Dan Nexon | 3 September, 2021 | ,

G. John Ikenberry is one of the most influential scholars of “liberal international order.” It’s likely that he, along with Dan Deudney, is responsible for popularizing the phrase. John’s most recent book, A World Safe for Democracy: Liberal Internationalism and the Crises of Global Order has reportedly shaped the thinking of the Biden foreign-policy team. I interviewed him for a recent podcast.

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