Like many, I woke up in shock at the massive earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria. The earthquake, centered in Gaziantep, has killed 3,000 as of Monday afternoon devastated southeast Turkey and northern Syria. In addition to Gaziantep, other affected Turkish cities...
Political Science isn’t sterile laboratory. The discipline is riddled with politics and deeply influenced by policy concerns.
Some political-science lab leaks are more difficult to control than others.
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....
David Brook’s latest column in the New York Times, banging on the same themes about “the kids are just not right,” raises some questions about what it means to engage in radical politics in the Trump era. Brooks compares the younger generation’s belief “that the system itself is rotten and needs to be torn down” to accomodationist and gradualisms. He continues on to speculate about how these new attitudes might affect older, more “pragmatic,” liberals who desire to work within the system. Brooks, as usual, uses a conservative argument to position himself in the “middle.” I have been...
I've been watching the current debate over nationalism with some interest. Donald Trump identified himself as a nationalist in the run-up to the mid-term elections. He contrasted this with his foes, for whom he used the problematic term "globalist." Many saw this as a concerning move, especially paired with Trump's alarmist rhetoric over a caravan of Central American migrants. It also prompted a response from France's President Macron, criticizing nationalism as a "betrayal of patriotism." This got me thinking of my graduate studies, which involved a good amount of reading on nationalism...
To illustrate this post, I would love to put that cute stock photo of a woman dressed in a taupe formal suit holding an adorable baby in a diaper, but it is just wildly unrealistic. For starters, the baby is horribly underdressed and the suit would have been covered in drool/spit-up/mysterious orange food rests in mere seconds. FYI, stock photo editors, working on a computer with a baby on your lap is also not an option, because in the end there will be one, and it will not be your computer. Guilt ridden and severely sleep deprived (and by “severely” I mean no sleep stretches longer than 3...
Details continue to trickle out about the horrific assassination of Saudi dissident and writer Jamal Khashoggi. This has captured the attention of foreign policy experts, who have questioned the alliance’s importance and suggested ways to punish Saudi Arabia. Concern about this incidents has spread beyond experts, however. My students and I have frequently debated what will happen to the US-Saudi alliance. And I recently appeared on WCAX in Burlington to discuss what comes next. To both audiences--and in contrast to some commentators--I gave the unsatisfying answer of “not much.” Time after...
I have had trouble blogging this past year. It's a challenge to think about academically informed observations on contemporary global politics when the world is in some places literally on fire and democracy appears to be in retreat. From a normative standpoint, it's been a hard thing to step back from with some sense of analytical detachment that blogging on this platform typically requires. In a special section of PS last year, I wrote about how to deal with these times on social media. In addition to blogging, I sought on social media to engage folks who thought differently from me about...
This post comes from Bridging the Gap co-director Jordan Tama, Associate Professor at the School of International Service at American University. American presidents have typically been more internationalist than the average member of Congress. For instance, many presidents have struggled to persuade Congress to approve important international agreements or increase spending on diplomacy and foreign assistance. Scholars of U.S. foreign policy have provided a compelling explanation for this pattern: since voters hold presidents more accountable than members of Congress for the country’s...
I feel like I should say something about the disappearance—and likely assassination—of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi. This tragedy was enabled by America’s permissive stance towards Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and US support for other horrific Saudi policies (like its bombing of Yemen). I’ve expressed concern on Twitter and in personal conversations, and have been writing about Yemen for years. But to be honest, I don’t think I have anything new to say at this point. Most Duck readers will already know, and be upset, about this situation. Instead, I want to raise another...
Over the weekend, fellow guest contributor Luke Perez had an interesting post on whether we need to include the grand paradigms of international relations (realism, liberalism, and constructivism) in foreign policy classes. He makes some good points on how to customize courses for foreign policy students; be sure to read it if you haven’t. I’d like to go further and ask whether we need to teach these paradigms at all. I’m coming at this from a different perspective than Perez. I teach at an undergraduate focused institution. So I’m preparing students for a broad array of potential political...