Carol Cohn is the G.O.A.T. Back in 1987, she wrote what is still the best gendered take on the pathologies of deterrence in a piece called, “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals.” It absolutely demolishes the cult of the missile bro. And every...
Willardson and Sullivan’s recent article here provided numerous useful tips for Americans who want to “profess abroad.” They also asked scholars outside the United States to weigh in with thoughts....
In 1932, John Chamberlain lamented “the unwillingness of the liberal to continue with analysis once the process of analysis had become uncomfortable.” He was critiquing the way...
Many MA programs at so-called professional schools of international affairs require students to complete a thesis. The purpose of this is not always clear-cut for students in terminal and...
I had a kind of unique path to my current tenure-track job, straddling the policy-academia divide. So I've followed current discussions on "alt-ac" careers with interest, but found something lacking in them. Nathan Paxton's recent interview with APSA crystallized that; the bigger question is not how to support alt-ac PhDs but how to counsel people before getting PhDs in the first place. As I've discussed, I sort of followed the "alt-ac" approach in the first part of my career. For those who haven't seen it, "alt-ac" means "alternative academic," referring to PhDs who pursue jobs outside of...
Note: This is the third post in an occasional series in which I talk about lessons learned (or related stuff) from my time editing International Studies Quarterly. My prior posts focused on "best practices" for writing decision letters (Part I and Part II). I won't knowingly review for a journal that doesn't, as a matter of policy, share anonymized copies of decision letters and reviewer reports with referees. Once a journal makes a decision and I don't receive these materials, I usually check to make sure that mistakes weren't made – that I didn't accidentally delete the notification or...
I realize this is a weird thing for me to ask, since the vast majority of my publications--as well as a few of my works in progress--have relied on regression. But I was wondering this recently based on my own and others' responses to a new project. I was presenting qualitative research recently that tried to make the case for ideas mattering in a conventional security studies topic (I'm being intentionally vague). I had a lot of evidence that it did, but the way it mattered was bit more nuanced than the way material factors mattered. An audience member took issue not with my evidence, but...
A guest post by Julia Palik, Peace Research Institute Oslo; Govinda Clayton, Center for Security Studies, ETH Zurich; Simon J. A. Mason, Head of Mediation Support Team, Center for Security Studies, ETH Zurich; and Siri Aas Rustad, Peace Research Institute Oslo On the surface, it should be easy. Practitioners and policy makers always require better knowledge to make informed decisions, and academics (nearly) always seek that their research makes an impact in the “real” world. Yet this rarely works out. In most cases academic-practice-policy dialogues, forums, meetings and conferences...
(Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images) It is a truth universally acknowledged that the academic job market is tough. Faculty openly warn political science PhD students that there are very few tenure-track jobs available, that they will be competing for those few positions against their most talented and accomplished peers, and that multiple publications and the imprimatur of an Ivy League school have become de facto pre-requisites for the top jobs. The academic job market has changed so rapidly that first-year professors often boast more publications than their tenured senior peers. From...
Fieldwork – “leaving one’s home institution in order to acquire data, information, or insights that significantly inform one’s research”(Kapiszewski, MacLean, and Read 2015: 1) – has long been a cornerstone of social science research. It is a remarkably diverse enterprise: ‘doing fieldwork’ can mean carrying out archival research, interviews, surveys, focus groups, participant observation, ethnography, or experiments. Fieldwork is also quite valuable: it helps orient scholars toward under-addressed ontological questions, including whether many of the concepts that we routinely study actually...
Political science has long had debates over methodology - i.e., ways of knowing about the world - but has had fewer over ontology - i.e. what exists in the world. This was noted by Peter Hall in his 2003 book chapter, “Aligning Ontology and Methodology in Comparative Research,” but other authors like Colin Hay and Liam Stanley have made the same critique. Why is this a problem? Two examples, one personal and one not: When I was a graduate student, it wasn’t until I reached India for my first fieldwork trip that I realized it was possible the very thing I wanted to study — ethnic...
This is a guest post from Prof. M. Victoria Pérez-Ríos. Pérez-Ríos holds a PhD in Political Science from The Graduate Center, CUNY (City University of New York); and graduated from the Law School of Saragossa, Spain. She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Political Science Department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and at the Social Science Department at LaGuardia Community College. Her research interests include civil rights, accountability & counterterrorism. She is currently writing a manuscript on memorials. Follow her at @victoriahhrr. This post is based on an ISA 2019...