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

Duck Forum on Teaching US Foreign Policy #1

Duck Forum on Teaching US Foreign Policy #1

by Jon Western | 16 October, 2013 | ,

[Note:  This is a guest post by Bruce Jentleson from Duke University.  It is the first in a four-part forum on teaching US Foreign Policy.] Six Concepts in Teaching American Foreign Policy by Bruce Jentleson As the Cold War went on, among scholars and teachers of American foreign policy there was some settling in to a sense that we knew the questions – containment? nuclear deterrence? Bretton Woods stability? ---- and were mostly debating the answers. Since the end of the Cold War there’s been renewed debate over what the questions themselves are. While this bears broadly on IR, it has been...

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Friday Morning Linkage

by Jon Western | 11 October, 2013 |

Human Rights Watch has a new report on the killing of 190 civilians in early August by members of five Islamist rebel groups:  Ahrar al-Sham, Islamic State of Iraq and Sham,  Jabhat al-Nusra,  Jaish al-Muhajireen wal-Ansar, Suquor al-Izz Congratulations to Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons on the Nobel Peace Prize.  They won't have much time to celebrate given a mid-2014 timeline to destroy all of Syria's chemical weapons capabilities.  Here's a link to this week's OPCW press conference on the latest from Syria with Director-General Ahmet Üzümcü and members of the Syria...

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ICC Victory over Immunity in Recent Clash with al-Bashir

by Jon Western | 3 October, 2013 |

[Note:  This is a guest post by Andrew G. Reiter, Assistant Professor of Politics at Mount Holyoke College] In 2009, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir on charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes committed in Darfur and expanded those charges to include genocide in 2010.  Yet al-Bashir recently claimed immunity as a head of state and requested a visa from the United States to travel freely to New York to participate in the UN General Assembly and return safely to the comfort of his palace in Khartoum.  In a “Marbury v. Madison”...

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ISA Working Groups

by Jon Western | 1 October, 2013 |

Registration is now open for the two ISA Working Groups scheduled for ISA Toronto. I am coordinating one of them with my colleague Kavita Khory on Global Trends in War, Conflict and Political Violence.  The Working Group is sponsored by the International Security Studies Section.  Here's a brief description: The year 2014 marks the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I. Over the past century, we have witnessed episodes of extreme interstate and intrastate violence as well as a more recent period of relative stability. This working group will bring together a group of scholars from...

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Friday Morning Linkage

by Jon Western | 27 September, 2013 |

A little late Friday morning reading: Moving toward a Syrian Tribunal?  Several former tribunal prosecutors will introduce their draft resolution on October 3 calling for one. Leslie Vinjamuri explains why she thinks the UNSC is wise not to refer Syria to the ICC. Research from our friends at Political Violence at a Glance making more news. Speaking of PV@ataGlance, Joe Young has a good piece on al-Shabab. More baby steps in the effort to get control of the global small arms trade. Things are not going well in Iraq -- street battles between current and former terrorist militias. And,...

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Research Primer for Religion and IR

by Jon Western | 25 September, 2013 |

Michael Desch and Daniel Philpott at Notre Dame have concluded their two-year Mellon funded working group on religion and IR and published their final report titled Religion and International Relations: A Primer for Research.  Desch, in his introduction (titled: "The Coming Reformation of Religion in International Affairs? The Demise of the Secularization Thesis and the Rise of New Thinking About Religion"), starts with a puzzle expressed by working group participant Timothy Shah: “religion has become one of the most influential factors in world affairs in the last generation but remains one...

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Friday Morning Linkage

by Jon Western | 20 September, 2013 |

  The Assad regime says the Syrian conflict is at a stalemate. Meanwhile a cease-fire between Free Syrian Army and Islamic State in Iraq and Syria forces in Azaz. Roy Gutman from McClatchy reports on some of the dynamics between FSA and radical Islamists. Battling it out in public -- McCain in Pravda responding to Putin; Rouhani in yesterday's Washington Post; Assad on Fox. New pressure to bring Israel into the Chemical Weapons Convention? And, Here's another cool data visualization site -- this one on global migration patterns. Malcolm Gladwell looks at some interesting data on...

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Analytic Eclecticism, Phantom Confrontations, and Dialogue: On Reus-Smit´s “Beyond Metatheory?”

by Jon Western | 18 September, 2013 |

[Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Guzman Castro of the University of Pennsylvania. This post refers to an article and post in the European Journal of International Relations-Duck of Minerva symposium on "The End of International Relations Theory?"by Christian Reus-Smit and the corresponding post by Milja Kurki.] Christian Reus-Smit's and Milja Kurki's interventions in the EJIR symposium are part of a laudable mission to defend meta-theory from the “activists for our emancipation from meta-theory.” The “activists” in this case turn out to be the duo of Sil and Katzenstein in their...

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Friday Afternoon Linkage

by Jon Western | 13 September, 2013 |

It's late Friday afternoon -- here are a few things worth reading: Betcy Jose asks, with all of the attention on chemical weapons, why does it matter how people die in conflict? Sohail Hashmi and I agree we need stronger protection for civilians in conflict, but ignoring the use of chemical weapons is not the way to do it. David Petrasek is moderating and contributing to an excellent discussion of R2P and Syria at OpenGlobalRights. A go-to source for documents and links on Syria Trying to get to the bottom of this.  There is a widening gap in reported regime casualties between the Syrian...

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Obama’s Dienbienphu Moment?

by Jon Western | 12 September, 2013 |

We have a pretty good literature on how presidents use and manipulate their information and propaganda advantages to move public opinion toward their positions on the use of force.  Both bottom –up, rational public arguments and top-down elite cueing models look at the institutional advantages of the presidency such as the bully pulpit, privileged access to information transmitted though classified intelligence and diplomatic channels, forging special access to the media, and the benefit of a history of Congressional and public deference to presidential leadership. But, when and under what...

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