Even when Latin Americans are allowed to speak, IR scholars and practitioners do not listen to them due to the language in which they produce knowledge, epistemic violence and access barriers.
When I first started teaching intro to IR, I closed the semester with lectures on climate change and the second Congo war (or "Africa's world war"). This was part of my effort to include current and...
Jarrod is joined by Daniela Lai (Royal Holloway) and Adam to talk about the role of big questions in IR scholarship and teaching. The trio engage recent tweets by Bear Braumoeller and Tom Nichols...
Looking for some podcast episodes to give a listen to? I’ve got suggestions.
Paul Musgrave has written an important piece discussing how ideas developed within academia can have profoundly negative effects when they escape into the wild of the policymaking world. For someone like me who has been involved for many years in the Bridging the Gap project, whose goal is to better connect academics and policymakers, this argument is important and cautionary. (In addition to Musgrave’s recent Foreign Policy piece, Michael Desch provides a long and extensive history of academic ideas leading to bad policy in his book The Cult of the Irrelevant.) I was...
If there's one thing that American political scientists agree about, it's that the U.S. "job market" is pretty brutal. It's not uncommon for junior scholars to bounce between postdocs and visiting positions before getting a tenure-track job or a stable non-tenure-track position – or before throwing in the towel and leaving academia entirely. Still others join the ranks of contingent faculty. With stagnation in the market for tenure-track positions and looming headwinds for U.S. higher education, we suspect that a growing number of political scientists with PhDs from American...
Academics are increasingly becoming targets of online harassment, but too many universities and colleges are unprepared to support and protect their faculty. What steps should they take?
Film critics have approached Adam Sandler’s films the same way that IR scholars have analyzed the rise and fall of the Liberal International Order (LIO)
Simple steps to promote qualitative research in journals It happened again. After months of waiting, you finally got that "Decision" email: Rejection. That's not so bad, it happens to everyone. But it's the nature of the rejection that gets to you. The reviewers (you assume fellow quals) didn't engage with your careful use of process tracing, your intricate case selection method. They just questioned your findings, pointed out your imperfect data, and chided you for leaving out irrelevant historical details. Basically, the reviewer refused to engage with the qualitative methods that are...
I get the sense that lots of scholars are viewing the return (sooner or later) of in-person conference with a good deal of ambivalence. Is it time to take all conference online?
The COVID-19 pandemic makes it clear – our students need a blend of science and policy literacy. Transnational challenges with technical dimensions are increasingly common. Pandemic disease, climate change, artificial intelligence, biotechnologies, and other issues touching our politics and society demand fluencies that no single academic department houses. So, how might educators prepare students for this complex world? Scholars in the mid-20th century recognized interdisciplinary needs in harnessing nuclear weapons. A few decades later, others did the same to address environmental issues....
Recently, David Edelstein and Jim Goldgeier circulated an open letter for signature to address bullying in the profession. The open letter can be found here. So far, there are nearly 100 signatures, including mine. As a sophomore in high school, I was 5’2”, weighed 215 pounds, was in a bunch of advanced classes with much older students, and played role-playing games in my spare time. I know a little bit about being bullied. And I know a lot about its toll. I know also that bullying can come in many forms, with some bullies savvier than others in terms of how they ply their craft. Verbal...