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

Announcing the 2014 Blogging Awards and Reception at ISA

by Jon Western | 20 November, 2013 |

Duck of Minerva is pleased to announce the second annual Online Achievement in International Studies (OAIS) Blogging Awards -- better known as the Duckie Awards -- and the second annual International Studies Blogging Reception at ISA in Toronto. We are asking Duck readers to submit nominations for the awards and later to vote for the three finalists in each category. Last year's winners have generously agreed to judge the finalists and select the 2014 winners. Once again, we are thrilled that with the support of SAGE and the efforts of SAGE editor David Mainwaring and the Sage staff, we will...

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Mixing Scholarly with Blogging Identities

by Jon Western | 18 November, 2013 |

[Note:  This is a guest post from Mira Sucharov and Brent E. Sasley.  Mira Sucharov is Associate Professor of Political Science at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She blogs at Haaretz.com and at Open Zion. Follow her on Twitter.  Brent Sasley is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Texas at Arlington. He blogs at Mideast Matrix. Follow him on Twitter.] Changes to our technology and to our scholarly norms present new challenges to scholars who engage in the public sphere. More and more academics in Political Science, and especially...

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Get Ready to Rumble….. NSA vs. State

by Jon Western | 1 November, 2013 |

OK, so it's not exactly Ali vs. Frazier, but NSA and the State Department are not happy with each other. From this morning's Cable at Foreign Policy, Yochi Dreazen reports: Secretary of State John Kerry touched off the furor when he said some of the NSA's overseas surveillance efforts -- which also included tapping into tens of millions of calls in France and Spain -- had been carried out without the Obama administration's knowledge or explicit approval. The remarks highlighted what appears to the White House's emerging strategy for dealing with widespread public fury over the programs:...

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Why the US Spies on Its Allies

by Jon Western | 26 October, 2013 |

The Guardian article this week that disclosed the story of U.S. eavesdropping on the leaders of several US allies said that the surveillance  produced "little reportable intelligence."  This isn't really a surprise -- I can't really imagine that listening to German Chancellor Merkel's phone conversations are going to give US analysts and policymakers a whole lot more than they get from open source and normal diplomatic channels. So why does the US do it?  The cheap answer to this question is that it comes from that sinister NSA organization. From this morning's NYTimes: In Washington, the...

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Advancing Global Environmental Governance

by Jon Western | 23 October, 2013 |

[Note: This is a guest post by Peter M. Haas of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst] Transboundary and global environmental threats require collection action.  Concretely, this means developing forms of governance that apply common rules, norms and decision making procedures.  Ideally, such governance should be resilient in the sense that it is able to persist over time and respond quickly and accurately to new threats. Yet the record of international environmental governance is mixed, at best. According to a recent UNEP overview of global environmental governance, some regimes have...

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Duck Forum on Teaching US Foreign Policy #4

by Jon Western | 19 October, 2013 |

[Note:  This is a guest post by Jerel A.Rosati of the University of South Carolina and James M. Scott of Texas Christian University.  It is the final installment in our forum on Teaching US Foreign Policy.  You can follow more of the conversation at #TeachForPol.] Teaching US Foreign Policy with The Politics of United States Foreign Policy (6th ed, Cengage: 2014). By Jerel A. Rosati and James M. Scott Using The Politics of United States Foreign Policy, we engage our students to consider the players, processes, and politics that drive U.S. decisions and involvement in the global political...

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Duck Forum on Teaching US Foreign Policy #3

by Jon Western | 18 October, 2013 |

[Note:  This is a guest post by James M. McCormick of Iowa State University and is the third post on the Duck Forum on Teaching US Foreign Policy] "Teaching American Foreign Policy in the 21st Century" by James M. McCormick, Iowa State University  In teaching the American foreign policy making course over the past several decades, I have always had three major goals.  First, I want students to become familiar with the values and beliefs that have influenced and shaped American foreign policy from its beginning to the present, albeit with a particular emphasis since World War II.  Second, I...

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What Makes a Great Scholar?

by Jon Western | 17 October, 2013 |

I attended a celebration of the life of Kenneth Waltz held at Columbia University last weekend. The service was organized and hosted by Robert Jervis, Robert Art, and Richard Betts and included sixteen speakers -- family members, scholars, and former students who gave wonderful tributes based on their own personal reflections on his life, research, and teaching. It was clear that Waltz was gifted intellectually. His book Man, the State, and War was written in just over a year in 1959 and transformed the field. But this was only the start, he made major intellectual contributions in each of...

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Duck Forum on Teaching US Foreign Policy #2

by Jon Western | 17 October, 2013 |

[Note:  This is a guest post by Steven W. Hook from Kent State University and is the second post on the Duck Forum on Teaching US Foreign Policy] “Teaching U.S. Foreign Policy in an Age of Uncertainty,” by Steven W. Hook (Kent State University) Students of U.S. foreign policy face a unique intellectual challenge: to understand state policy making at the intersection of domestic and global governance. Their instructors, who face the same task, need to integrate the two domains in their lectures and assignments. Along the way, they confront the added burdens of making some sense of the...

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Duck Forum on Teaching US Foreign Policy

by Jon Western | 16 October, 2013 |

Duck of Minerva is pleased to announce the start of a four-part series of posts on teaching US Foreign Policy.  The forum includes contributions from the authors of major undergraduate textbooks on U.S. foreign policy:  Bruce Jentleson (Duke University), Steven Hook  (Kent State), Jim McCormick (Iowa State), and James Scott (Texas Christian) and Jerel Rosati (University of South Carolina). Bruce Jentleson initiated and coordinated the forum -- as you can see below he has also set up a Twitter hashtag #TeachForPol to continue this discussion.  In setting up the forum, he writes: In the posts...

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