Like many, I've finally gotten back on schedule after the American Political Science Association conference last week. The travel was easier for me than most others; the site, Montreal, is only two miles from home so I didn't have to deal with any airline mishaps. But...
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...
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...
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:...
As one of the new Ducks, I will from now on be posting diversely on a range of topics including political violence, the status of critique in IR, and professional issues that will be of particular interest to early career scholars and PhD students. For my first post, however, I want to write about the style of writing IR and/or Political Science. This is something that has troubled me for some time now and on which – I think – I depart slightly from the mainstream view of things. To begin, let me quote the author’s ‘style’ guidelines for the ISA journal International Studies Quarterly: Favor...
Today we begin the Bridging the Gap "Book Nook," a series of short videos describing new books by scholars in the BTG network. For the first entry, our very own Brent Durbin discusses his book, The CIA and the Politics of US Intelligence Reform (Cambridge, 2017). (We hope to do a bunch of these, and we would welcome any thoughts on how to improve the format!)
The past week has seen a boiling-over of controversy regarding a publication by Bruce Gilley entitled “The Case for Colonialism,” appearing in the journal Third World Quarterly, leading some to even begin petitions to the journal to retract. As of the writing of this post, the journal has not retracted the article. In this post, I would like to reflect on this piece as both a part of a scholarly conversation: showing how its claims are the result of poor methodology, a bad reading of the existing literature on colonialism in political science and other fields, and a general glossing-over of...
This inaugural post from our partners at Bridging the Gap is written by Naazneen Barma and Brent Durbin, who will be coordinating contributions from BTG's network of scholars. Take a moment to think back to college – or whenever you decided to pursue the path that has brought you here, reading about world politics and sundry related topics on the Duck of Minerva. What set you on this path? What made you want to devote years of your life to studying politics, perhaps even through formal graduate training? If you’re like us, you looked out and saw a puzzling and imperfect world, and you wanted...
In some sense, it is with a heavy heart that I write my last permanent contributor blog post at the Duck. I’ve loved being with the Ducks these past years, and I’ve appreciated being able to write weird, often off the track from mainstream political science, blogs. If any of you have followed my work over the years, you will know that I sit at an often-uncomfortable division between scholarship and advocacy. I’ve been one of the leading voices on lethal autonomous weapon systems, both at home in academia, but also abroad at the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons,...
As one of the new Ducks, I'm linking to bits and pieces catching my eye/getting me thinking for the first time this morning. Enjoy! Academia Handy guidance on 'how to get rid of your fake academic self' supplied by David Berliner. APSA I wasn't at APSA but John Yoo put in a controversial appearance along with the iconic orange jumpsuit and a barrage of protesters. See APSA members' letter against the appearance and APSA's response (and let's never forget the Torture Memos). .. & the award for the best #APSA2017 tweet goes to @mia_iris_costa! Cuba-US Relations New kind of attack alert:...
We are pleased to welcome some new guest Ducks, including an exciting new partnership. We also are pleased that guest bloggers, Lisa Gaufman, Jeff Stacey, Jeremy Youde, and Will Winecoff will continue to blog for the Duck. We wanted to thank all the guest bloggers who contributed last year including Maryam Deloffre, Alexis Henshaw, Charles Martel, Raul Pacheco-Vega, and Mira Sucharov. Our first guest is a little different than the others. We are excited to partner with Bridging the Gap to leverage their network of policy-relevant scholars to write for the Duck periodically. So, under the...
The Financial Times just announced guidance that there will no longer be all male panels -- manels -- at any FT or partner events. It made me think whether APSA or ISA should adopt a similar policy. Pleased that @FT has established a "no manels" rule for FT panels and FT panellists as one of our diversity/inclusion initiatives. pic.twitter.com/6VZSuhlkEo — Andrew Hill (@andrewtghill) August 21, 2017 The Emerging Norm Against Manels In the past few years, we've seen a lot more attention directed towards the egregious presence of manels in international relations, particularly in events at...