The Duck of Minerva

Steve Saideman

Steve Saideman is Professor and the Paterson Chair in International Affairs at Carleton University’s Norman Paterson School of International Affairs. He has written The Ties That Divide: Ethnic Politics, Foreign Policy and International Conflict; For Kin or Country: Xenophobia, Nationalism and War (with R. William Ayres); and NATO in Afghanistan: Fighting Together, Fighting Alone (with David Auerswald), and elsewhere on nationalism, ethnic conflict, civil war, and civil-military relations.

Recent Posts

Russian Irredentism: Killing Kin To Save the Kin?

Russian Irredentism: Killing Kin To Save the Kin?

by Steve Saideman | 11 March, 2022 | ,

Watching recent events (and inspired by this tweet about Latvia's PM's take on this), I am reminded of a famous misquotation from the American war in Vietnam: "we had to destroy the village in order to save it." Seems like Putin's Russia is killing the kin in order to save them. The attacks on the Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine are hurting those that Russia is supposedly trying to help. This speaks to a variety of ethnic/irredentist dynamics. First, when a country tries to reclaim supposedly lost territory, the ethnic kin in the lost territory don't have to demand this effort but it does...

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Teaching in the Age of Corona, One Year Later

Teaching in the Age of Corona, One Year Later

by Steve Saideman | 31 March, 2021 |

Last year, at this time, I wrote about my first experiences in the new online teaching free-for-all era.  Besides no longer using Corona, what else have I learned from teaching online? [Note, I have only taught five classes so my observations are based on impressions and thin anecdata] It does not have to suck.  The big difference between last spring vs last fall and this winter is that we had no prep time, not chance to design syllabi, no chance to get much instruction or help.  Most of my friends have now put a lot of time into thinking about and then preparing online classes.  Online...

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Want to Improve Equity and Inclusion in Political Science? Address White Supremacy

Want to Improve Equity and Inclusion in Political Science? Address White Supremacy

by Steve Saideman & Anna Meier | 11 January, 2021 | , ,

Last week, the American Political Science Association released a milquetoast statement on the January 6 white supremacist attack at the U.S. Capitol that got buried in the onslaught of news coverage. It resurfaced on Twitter over the weekend to outrage, with many political scientists noting that the statement omitted any acknowledgment of racism or white supremacy but did mention that “both sides” needed to “do better.” As is probably clear from my use of “milquetoast,” I was part of the outrage. I am a scholar of responses to white supremacist violence in the U.S. and Germany. I have...

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Can IR Have Its Own “Big 3” Journals?

by Steve Saideman | 30 November, 2020 |

This is a guest post by Krista Wiegand, Director of the Global Security Program at the Howard Baker Center for Public Policy and Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Tennessee. She is co-Editor-in-Chief of International Studies Quarterly. I was once asked on a job interview by a non-IR political scientist why I hadn’t published in the “big 3” journals – American Political Science Review (APSR), American Journal of Political Science (AJPS), and Journal of Politics (JOP). My response was that I had published in top IR journals where my IR colleagues read my work. I...

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The Right to Return…to What? Venezuelan Migrants Caught Between Conflicts

The Right to Return…to What? Venezuelan Migrants Caught Between Conflicts

by Steve Saideman | 18 November, 2020 | ,

This is a guest post by Shauna N. Gillooly is a PhD Candidate at the University of California, Irvine and a visiting researcher at Pontifica Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia. Her research focuses on peacebuilding and transitional justice in contexts of continued political violence. In 2015, Venezuela’s already-in decline economy took yet another turn for the worse. Then-historically low oil prices, along with internal mismanagement of infrastructure by Maduro’s administration, led to millions of Venezuelans leaving the country in search of a more stable life. For many of them, the...

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Leader Personalities: Trump vs. Biden

Leader Personalities: Trump vs. Biden

by Steve Saideman | 27 October, 2020 |

This is a guest post from Ryan Beasley, Senior Lecturer at the University of St Andrews, with research interests in political psychology and foreign policy: Juliet Kaarbo, Professor at the University of Edinburgh, who works on personalities, parliaments and parties in foreign policy; and Consuelo Thiers (Twitter @Consuelothiers), a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, who is completing her doctorate on beliefs and emotions in enduring rivalries. For those of us who study leaders’ personalities and how they affect their actions while in power, President Trump has really been a...

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Beyond the Open Skies Treaty

by Steve Saideman | 20 July, 2020 | ,

Guest post by Sandor Fabian is a PhD candidate at the University of Central Florida and instructor of record at the NATO Special Operations School. His research is in security studies with a focus on new concepts of conflict, U.S. foreign military aid, and counter hybrid warfare. Follow him at @SandorFabian2 and Doreen Horschig is a PhD candidate and teaching associate at the University of Central Florida. Her research is in nuclear security with a focus on public and elite opinion on nuclear weapons and norms of weapons of mass destruction. Follow her at @doreen__h By now the world has...

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Dear Civ-Mil Community: The (Retired) Generals Are Speaking & We Should Listen

Dear Civ-Mil Community: The (Retired) Generals Are Speaking & We Should Listen

by Steve Saideman | 3 June, 2020 | ,

This is a guest post by Carrie A. Lee, an Assistant Professor at the US Air War College. The opinions and recommendations offered in this piece are those of the author do not represent the official policy or positions of the U.S. Government, U.S. Air Force, or Air War College. On the first evening of June 2020, President Donald Trump used National Guard military police units to fire tear gas and rubber bullets on peaceful demonstrators in front of St. John’s Episcopal church in Washington, DC. The move, which was largely perceived to be an intentional and excessive show of force to clear the...

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Coronavirus, Communal Violence, and the Politics of Rivalry in India and Pakistan

Coronavirus, Communal Violence, and the Politics of Rivalry in India and Pakistan

by Steve Saideman | 18 May, 2020 | , , ,

This is a guest post by Elizabeth Radziszewski, Assistant Professor at Rider University and author of forthcoming book Private Militaries and Security Industry in Civil Wars: Competition and Market Accountability (Oxford University Press) and Jonathan M. DiCicco, Associate Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Middle Tennessee State University and a Senior Fellow with the TransResearch Consortium. While the world has been coping with the disastrous COVID-19 pandemic, India and Pakistan have experienced the worst cross-border fighting in two years. Unfortunately, this...

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Doing PhD Research While Staying in Place

Doing PhD Research While Staying in Place

by Steve Saideman | 2 April, 2020 | ,

Last night, I taught another session of our Dissertation Proposal Workshop class, and the topic was the methodology section of one's proposal.  That is, how am I going to research this question and how do I justify the choices I made?  This is after going through the other pieces--the question, the proposed answer, what other folks have said about this or have said about other stuff that you want to bring to this project, the theory, and the hypotheses.  How does one test the hypotheses was the question du jour (or nuit).  Before I start, to be clear, no one should expect...

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