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

Paying for Advice? Just Say No

by Steve Saideman | 11 March, 2013 |

How do we know the job market is broken for academics?  Because people are willing to spend money hiring advisers.  Really.  This article documents the costs of being on the market these days.  To be clear, this piece is deceptive and unrepresentative.  But as a result, it is representative.  Huh?  How does that make any sense? Because the academic job market is so tough, it is poorly understood, and people then perhaps over-think what it takes to succeed.  Plus some stuff has changed, some has not. First, let's talk about the biggest expense: conference travel.  In some fields (not...

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Counter-What?

by Steve Saideman | 6 March, 2013 |

This article discusses the importance of doing counter-intuitive work in the social sciences: We love our counterintuitive findings. And for fields such as psychology, they’re almost a necessity.If new conclusions already gel with our beliefs, goes the common refrain, why was precious taxpayer money ever wasted on the study in the first place? (I find the prospect of a society populated by commenters on most social science articles chilling.) Never mind that because our beliefs are not immune to prevailing worldviews, what we find intuitive has almost certainly been shaped by the past...

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Friday Nerd Blogging: Presidential Edition

by Steve Saideman | 1 March, 2013 |

Twitter went nuts when President Obama said he could not get the Republicans to do what is right because of his finite powers, that he could not do some sort of Jedi mind-meld! He mixed his space franchises--Jedis may have Vulcan-like abilities, but the mind meld thing is of Star Trek.  So, this sent twitter on a wonderful spiral for awhile. Some of the highlights: RT @jpodhoretz: "By Grabthar's hammer, you will be sequestered." — Hayes Brown (@HayesBrown) March 1, 2013   RT @angelaisms: "Dammit Luke, I'm a doctor, not your father!" #ObamaSciFiQuotes — Philip Klein (@philipaklein) March...

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Friday Nerd Blogging, Hiatus Ends Appropriately

by Steve Saideman | 15 February, 2013 |

We have fallen short of our Friday responsibilities, but given the theme of the week, this video seems most appropriate. Of course, this raises all kinds of possibilities and re-definitions of "bad" PR. My guess is that the best episode of this series of six web-isodes will be the next one. The third will be ok, and then then next three will be profoundly disappointing.

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Delegation Leads to Shirking, Shirking Leads to Failure …

by Steve Saideman | 14 February, 2013 |

and Failure leads to Fear, Anger and all that Stuff.  In the renewed discussion of the Battle of Hoth and other failures of the Galactic Empire, there is a running theme throughout many of the posts: how does a leader get the underlings to do what they are supposed to do.  Given the affinity between the dark side of the force and Principal-Agency theory,* it is somewhat surprising that nearly all of these analyses have been atheoretical and have ignored the most applicable framework. As the great Jedi Mace Windu once said, it is principals and agents all the way down.  The Emperor is the...

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Lamenting The Loss of the Light, The Ebbing of Grand Theory and The Decline of Old Boy Networks

by Steve Saideman | 5 January, 2013 |

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have written a piece that is critical of the supposed move to hypothesis testing and the failure of IR folks to do grand theory.   I have many reactions to this development that I thought I would engage in a bit of listicle: My first reaction was: Next title: why too much research is bad for IR.... As folks pointed out on twitter and on facebook discussions, it seems ironic at the least that someone who made a variety of testable predictions that did not come true (the rise of Germany after the end of the cold war, conventional deterrence, the irrelevance of...

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