What happens when a research subject becomes a research and briefing partner? In 2017, I was contacted by the peacebuilding NGO Peace Direct to contribute to a policy report on community-based atrocities prevention. I invited a local peacebuilder I knew from...
This is a guest post by Jeffrey C. Isaac, James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, Bloomington. You can follow him at his blog at Democracy in Dark Times. Democracy is a...
In less than a month, I'll be teaching "Introduction to International Relations" for the first time in over ten years. As luck (for certain values of "luck") would have it, this means I'm building a...
This is the third post in our series on Race&IR.This is a guest post from Carla Norrlöf and Cheng Xu. Carla Norrlöf is an associate professor at the University of Toronto. Her research is in...
Seems to be the time of year when folks post their advice for aspiring professors on how to succeed at the job talk. While there are other parts of the process--being interviewed one on one by various members of the department or getting grilled by a committee (something that happens far more in Canada than in the US), the most important (and probably not deservedly so)* part of the "fly-out" is giving a talk based on one's research and responding in the Q&A. I tend not to be very humble here and offer all kinds of unsolicited advice, but I hesitate on this particular question because...
As I blogged earlier today, climate change has not gotten sufficient attention from political scientists. Part of the problem is that few people teach graduate classes on the environment. I didn't take one in graduate school and basically had to teach myself the topic. This past spring, I taught a full 15 week graduate class for MA students on global environmental governance, expanding a previous global health and environment class in to two separate classes. There are potentially large start-up costs for someone who wants to teach a class in this space. So, I'm going to start an open thread...
With the G20 set to commence in Hangzhou, the United States and China today ratified the Paris Agreement, making it increasingly likely that it will enter into force by year's end. This is a momentous occasion in climate diplomacy and speaks to the increasing political salience of this topic. Yesterday, here at APSA, there was a fantastic roundtable on what political science has to say about this issue. The roundtable included some of the leading up and coming scholars writing about climate change including Jennifer Hadden, Johannes Urpelainen, Jessica Green, David Konisky, and Steven...
Are we in business? Believe so. See you at APSA. Join us for the Tweetup!
As has become a tradition, political scientists who are active on twitter are meeting up at the APSA: Thursday, 7pm at Pennsylvania 6, a nearby bar. The idea is to get a chance to chat with people you may "know" online but have not met in person. I hope to see you there.
A common argument made in favor of the use of robotics to deliver (lethal) force is that the violence used is mediated in such a way that it naturally de-escalates a situation. In some versions, this is due to the fact that the “robot doesn’t feel emotions,” and so is not subject to fear or anger. In other strands, the argument is that due to distance in time and space, human operators are able to take in more information and make better judgments, including to use less than lethal or nonlethal force. These debates have, up until now, mostly occurred with regards to armed conflict. ...
Oh man, I really didn't want to write about Angelina Jolie Pitt (AJP) and her damn LSE appointment. When I heard the news it just made me feel tired. But there has been an interesting/frustrating debate emerging and I just can't keep my yap shut- even on maternity leave. In his post on the topic, Dan Drezner asks us to all calm the F down; he assures us that policy schools have always been opportunistic and brought in pretty unqualified but interesting folks to teach (well, he sort of says that). The Aidnography post, Why you should be critical of Professor Angelina Jolie Pitt's LSE gig...
Yesterday, news quickly spread that the Social Science Research Network was bought by Elsevier. This quickly caused an uproar on twitter. Why? The SSRN was established to provide a place for social scientists to share their work in progress. Elsevier is one of the most rapacious rent-seeking profitable publishers of academic journals. Elsevier charges large amounts of money to universities so that universities can provide access to bundles of journals (the de-bundling movement in cable might remind folks that bundling is not an altruistic strategy by those facing little competition). ...