I replicated the go-to method for using ChatGPT to “cheat” on college essays. Here are my takeaways.
Half-Baked Thoughts on ChatGPT and the College Essay
read more
Academia
The Leakage Between Political Science and Policy Goes Both Ways
Political Science isn’t sterile laboratory. The discipline is riddled with politics and deeply influenced by policy concerns.
How Can We Vaccinate Against Viral Political Science?
Some political-science lab leaks are more difficult to control than others.
The Democratic Peace isn’t a Virus
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....
More Academia Posts
Congress, Trump, and Internationalism in U.S. Foreign Policy
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...
What the UAE’s detention of a UK graduate student means for Middle East studies
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...
Do we need to teach the IR paradigms at all?
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...
Syllabus Musing—can we teach foreign policy without paradigms?
As a new postdoc to the Kinder Insitute, I have the good fortune not to be teaching this semester. In addition to working on my book manuscript—more on that later—I have been spending a good deal of time thinking through my class on U.S. foreign policy. This has been a good experience even at this early stage because it has forced me to think about what students really need to know about foreign policy, and it has provided me the spurring I needed to begin distilling my graduate training into a systematic framework. Writing a syllabus poses several challenges, not least of which are what the...
This Blog Post is About Conference Program Selection
This is a guest post from Jonathan D. Caverley, Associate Professor at the Naval War College and Research Scientist at MIT, and Monica Duffy Toft, Professor at Tufts University, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. The program for the 2019 International Studies Association (ISA) meeting has been released, and International Relations Twitter has feelings about it. The stakes of inclusion on the program are not small. Presenting a paper at ISA is frequently an essential step towards publication in the field’s refereed journals, these meetings provide valuable networking space, travel funds...
Reflections on a Hoax
Last week, an article published in the online outlet Areo revealed a hoax that involved ideologically motivated academics writing fake papers in the realms of what they characterized as “grievance studies,” and trying to place them in humanities journals—the idea being to demonstrate that such research is meaningless and not rigorous. Besides the fact that the hoaxsters were mostly unsuccessful in this endeavor—only four papers out of the twenty authored were published—the fact that this endeavor has been used as a tool to discredit a wide-range of scholarship in the realms of , inter alia,...
MbS made USCIRF smile: Gatekeepers and Norm Erosion
For many, Saudi Arabia finally went too far. Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi went missing after entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul; reports suggest he may be dead. Pundits who gave Mohammed bin Salman—Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince, also known as MbS—a chance to prove his reformist credentials have become critical. In the midst of all this, a commissioner of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom—(USCIRF) a government-affiliated human rights watchdog—announced…that Saudi Arabia is making great progress on protecting religious freedom? At first glance, this is confusing, but...
Welcome New Ducks
The school year is off to a great start, and we wanted to thank our previous slate of guest Ducks and welcome some new guests. Thanks to all of our guests from last year. Lisa Gaufman and Dillon Tatum are staying on as guests, and we are delighted that our partnership with Bridging the Gap will continue with the BtG channel. We also have a fantastic slate of new guests Ducks including Jill Hazelton, Peter Henne, Sahar Khan, Luke Perez, and Kai Thaler. We have a strong slate of security-minded guests this year. They cover a range of topics from counterinsurgency to religion and the Middle...