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

Some Book Publishing Tips

by Steve Saideman | 12 November, 2014 |

Yesterday, I was part of a panel at Carleton organized to provide other profs/students with suggestions about how to get their stuff published in book form.  The Canadian process is different from the American process, so I spent my ten minutes on the lessons I learned from my experiences with American publishers. What did I say? Read stuff for style, not just content.  If you want to know how to write a good book that is publishable, notice the books you like and how they are written, not just what they say. One of the panelists discussed how many different kinds of books there are:...

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The Costs of Irredentism

by Steve Saideman | 8 November, 2014 |

In For Kin or Country, the basic idea is to explain a set of policies that is always expensive.  When one tries to take the territory of another country, there tends to be a response.  While folks dismissed Obama's line about Putin's moves having a cost, it turns out that he was right. These costs come, as always, in two forms: political and economic.  Thanks to both our friend the security dilemma and due to the domestic dynamics of the target, there are reactions.  If Russia thought it was being encircled before, it will certainly feel so now.  Some are calling for containment part two (or...

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Conversation Hijacking: How Not To Insert Yourself into a Conversation by Pushing a Woman Out of It

by Steve Saideman | 21 October, 2014 |

This is a guest post from Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham, an associate professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland.  She is the author of Inside the Politics of Self-determination (Oxford University Press, 2014). I was recently at a relatively small academic conference, one that I’ve been attending for years whenever I can. The size of the meeting encourages engagement between big names and small names, grad students and professors, and across genders. It is a classic academic mixer, filled with slightly awkward people, many of whom are slightly disheveled, talking...

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Under Review: Cite This!

by Steve Saideman | 18 October, 2014 |

The boon and bane of our academic enterprise is that we get feedback all the time on our work.  Our work is better for it--that the hack-iest stuff I read is always stuff that is not submitted to any kind of refereeing process and relies instead on editors who seem to be blind to the hack-ness.   The bane is that, well, rejection and criticism can not only delay publication but also hurt feelings.  When well done, reviews further the enterprise.  However, sometimes, reviews seem to make the authors dance in relatively unproductive ways.  There have been lots of tweets and posts complaining...

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