This is the third in our series of remembrances on the late scholar Susan Sell. Professor Susan Sell was a world class scholar. But even though one of the papers she wrote (about using ideas strategically) was very influential in my personal intellectual...
It turns out that it’s hard to write a roundup of happenings at the Duck of Minerva when there aren’t many to speak of. Much of that’s on me. What’s my excuse? Well, the kid finally contracted...
Our next Bridging the Gap Book Nook features Emmanuel Balogun, an assistant professor of political science at Skidmore College and Bridging the Gap's inaugural Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion...
I wrapped the 2022 edition of my undergraduate “Grand Strategy” seminar this past Tuesday. This must have the eight or ninth iteration of the class. I like teaching it. I really do. But I have...
Sean Kay, a much beloved international relations professor at Ohio Wesleyan, died suddenly of a heart attack in November. Though I blogged about Sean in December, we will be publishing a series of memorials to Sean from former students and colleagues over the remainder of this week. The post below is a guest post from Ahsan Butt, an Associate Professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University and a nonresident fellow at the Stimson Center. Even two months after his death, Sean Kay’s passing still feels shocking. Sean was a vivacious, larger than life presence,...
This is a guest post by Simon Frankel Pratt. He is a lecturer in the School of Sociology, Politics, and International Studies at the University of Bristol. In the social sciences, research and data are often divided into the categories ‘quantitative’ and ‘qualitative’. This is incoherent and should stop. There’s nothing informative in this distinction in terms of the logic of enquiry, the mode of inference, or the way data are used to support claims about the world. There is nothing methodological about it. But it won’t stop because if it did, our discipline would further marginalise...
This is a guest post from Jeff Colgan, Richard Holbrooke Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Climate Solutions Lab at Brown University. He is author of Petro-Aggression: When Oil Causes War, and tweets @JeffDColgan A slew of new books on grand strategy and international order signal the renaissance these topics are enjoying among scholars. Alas, most of the current thinking does not pay nearly enough attention to climate change—the world’s most important global challenge. Specifically, we are not thinking hard enough about the tradeoffs states face while pursuing the...
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...
Daniel J. Levine is Aaron Aronov Associate Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Alabama, where he divides his time between the Departments of Political Science and Religious Studies. Information on his research can be found here. Last fall, I taught – as I have done every year since coming to the University of Alabama (UA) – an upper-division lecture-seminar on the Israel-Palestine Conflict. The topic is never an easy one, with both the transition to remote teaching, and the acutely partisan political climate of the US elections, adding to the...
This post was written by Marie Berry and Milli Lake, co-founders and principal investigators of the Women’s Rights After War Project. Dr. Berry is Associate Professor at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver and a member of Bridging the Gap's current International Policy Summer Institute cohort. Dr. Lake is Associate Professor in the International Relations Department at the London School of Economics and a co-founder of the Advancing Research on Conflict Consortium. What happens when research findings challenge the work that policy makers are invested...
This post is written by Bridging the Gap Fellow Dr. Danielle Gilbert, Assistant Professor of Military & Strategic Studies at the U.S. Air Force Academy. The views expressed in this article are the author’s and do not represent the U.S. Air Force Academy, the Department of the Air Force, or the Department of Defense. The author would like to thank the brilliant women of her yes and no committees for their time, feedback, permission, and encouragement to write this—you know who you are. Six women approved the writing of this post: my “yes committee,” my “no committee,” and the...
WARNING: Minor Spoilers for Wonder Woman 1984 ahead Like many Americans, I ended my Christmas day by paying $15 to subscribe to HBO Max and watch Wonder Woman 1984. The much anticipated sequel to 2017's Wonder Woman promised to make the horrors of 2020 fade for awhile. And it did, but only by replacing them with frustration and confusion. It...wasn't a great film. You can read why, or just watch it yourself. But what really stuck out to me was the particular sort of Orientalism it contained, a lazy Orientalism oblivious to its political implications but still problematic. Wonder Woman 1984...