The Duck of Minerva

Jon Western

Jon Western has spent the last fifteen years teaching IR in liberal arts colleges at Mount Holyoke College and the Five Colleges in western Massachusetts. He has an eclectic range of intellectual interests but often writes on international security, U.S. foreign policy, military intervention, and human rights. He occasionally shares his thoughts about professional life in liberal arts colleges. In his spare time he coaches middle school soccer, mentors the local high school robotics team, skis, and sails.

Recent Posts

Crossing borders in the sciences

by Jon Western | 20 April, 2012 |

In an essay in this month's Scientific American, Alice Gast, president of Lehigh University, makes a case for the benefits of international collaboration in the sciences:It has become cliche that great discoveries come from interdisciplinary thinking... [F]ew realize how much science is energized when team members have different cultural approaches to problem solving. International diversity is just as important as diversity of discipline. She notes that years ago when she began a collaboration with researchers in Mexico and Germany, the "approaches seemed irreconcilable:"...my Mexican...

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Anger in America

by Jon Western | 9 March, 2012 |

Rush Limbaugh, the teaparty, OWS, all the way to the seven sisters -- a deeply misguided Smith College alumna, an open feud between Barnard and Columbia... and so it goes... Bobcat Goldthwait's new dark satire, God Bless America is supposed to be an hysterical look at the mixing of stupidity and anger. I just hope its funny....

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Mugabe Last Dictator Standing

by Jon Western | 2 December, 2011 |

Unfortunately this ad from the South African fast food chain Nando is now banned:Nando's South Africa decided to axe its commercial after Mugabe loyalists from the Chipangano group had called for a boycott and other unspecified punitive action against the company."We condemn such adverts because it reduces our president to be someone without values," Chipangano leader Jimmy Kunaka told the BBC's Brian Hungwe earlier this week. Hmmm.... I thought his corrupt rule had done that.... Special contest for Duck readers: identify the dictators and the number of movie parodies:

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Humanitarian Intervention

by Jon Western | 29 November, 2011 |

In the current issue of Foreign Affairs, Joshua Goldstein and I make the case that humanitarian interventions, as part of a broader set of civilian protection mechanisms, are contributing to a reduction in mass atrocity events.To some extent, widespread skepticism is understandable: past failures have been more newsworthy than successes, and foreign interventions inevitably face steep challenges. Yet such skepticism is unwarranted. Despite the early setbacks in Libya, NATO’s success in protecting civilians and helping rebel forces remove a corrupt leader there has become more the rule of...

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Yugoslavia’s last premier

by Jon Western | 29 November, 2011 |

Ante Markovic, the last Prime Minister of Yugoslavia died today at the age of 87. From 1989 to 1991, he was seen by many as the last person who could stop the disintegration of the Yugoslav federation and avert war. A darling of liberals, he tried to institute a series of political and economic reforms and to alleviate the rising nationalist discourses and pressures -- especially in Croatia and Serbia. His last ditch appeal to the international community and the U.S. for debt reduction and aid failed, so too did his effort to avert war. He left political life and with the exception of a...

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Recommendation Letter Rant (piling on)

by Jon Western | 23 November, 2011 |

Erik Voeten is spot on with his post at The Monkey Cage today on the flaws in the current recommendation letter system: There may be all kinds of things wrong with law schools but they sure have figured out how to run an applications process. You submit one letter for a student, answer a few questions about how to rank the student compared to others, and that’s it!By contrast, each policy school and PhD program has its own application process. I am sure this is annoying for students. It’s equally annoying for professors. If you have ten students who each apply to ten programs, then you need...

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Ugh, there’s still a year to go….

by Jon Western | 15 November, 2011 |

There are many reasons why I hate the length of American presidential campaigns -- not the least of which is the banality of most political journalism -- and quite frankly I haven't been paying much attention to any of the current campaigns. But these two clips below do suggest that long campaigns -- and the thousand or so debates -- may produce some benefit. With each passing day Cain, Perry, and Bachmann reveal more of their amateurishness and that they really are not fit to be president. Yet, all three had significant populist surges that might have created far different dynamics in a...

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Arming Syria’s rebels

by Jon Western | 6 November, 2011 |

This is a guest post from Idean Salehyan, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of North Texas and the author of Rebels Without Borders: Transnational Insurgencies in World Politics (Cornell Univ. Press, 2009).Reports have emerged that Turkey is supporting a group of military defectors from Syria, which have organized under the name, the ‘Free Syrian Army’ or FSA. Led by Riyad al-Asad, a former Colonel in Bashar Assad’s army, this group claims to have inflicted a series of impressive attacks against regime forces. Although the extent of Turkish involvement is still...

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Qaddafi, Intervention and R2P

by Jon Western | 20 October, 2011 |

I've been in the throes of finishing a book and other matters so I haven't had a chance to blog much lately. A couple of quick observations on the death of Qaddafi (assuming the reports are confirmed). First, he died with almost all of the country opposed to his rule and celebrating his death. Second, he was killed and his forces were defeated by indigenous forces with the support of NATO. While we have seen a good deal of criticism of NATO, US Libya policy, and of R2P (as a neo-imperialist enterprise) in the past several months, that criticism has tended to dismiss or diminish the fact that...

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Meanwhile, back in Bosnia….

by Jon Western | 10 October, 2011 |

Long-time Bosnia watchers Vlado Azinovic, Kurt Bassuener, and Bodo Weber from the Democrtization Policy Council in Sarajevo issue a warning to the EU and NATO to restore a deterrence capability in the country:The deterioration of the prevailing political dynamic is not only continuing, but accelerating one year after the general elections of October 2010. The mix of variables makes political miscalculation all the more likely. The costs of such miscalculation by local political actors are likely to be far greater than they were prior to 2005 because of the perceived potential to realize...

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