Robert Cox’s landmark article, “Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Rela…
Episode 32: Social Forces, States, and Clydeside Whisky
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Ann Towns
Professor Ann Towns of the University of Gothenburg visits the Hayseed Scholar podcast. Professor Towns grew up in Sweden, and was interested in playing music and especially performing classical...
Does IR ask big questions?
Jarrod is joined by Daniela Lai and Adam Lerner to talk about the role of big questions in IR scholarship and teaching.
Helen Kinsella
Professor Helen Kinsella joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast. Professor Kinsella grew up in Ithaca, New York, and she reflects on what that was like, plus a reluctance or indifference to going to...
More Featured Posts
6+1 QUESTIONS ABOUT Resowing the Seeds of War: Presidential Peace Rhetoric Since 1945
What if how presidents talk about ending wars contributes to the cycle of U.S. military intervention? Stephen J. Heidt answers 6+1 questions about his new book.
How Quals can avoid becoming our own worst enemies
Simple steps to promote qualitative research in journals It happened again. After months of waiting, you finally got that "Decision" email: Rejection. That's not so bad, it happens to everyone. But it's the nature of the rejection that gets to you. The reviewers (you assume fellow quals) didn't engage with your careful use of process tracing, your intricate case selection method. They just questioned your findings, pointed out your imperfect data, and chided you for leaving out irrelevant historical details. Basically, the reviewer refused to engage with the qualitative methods that are...
6+1 Questions About MAKING THE WORLD SAFE FOR Dictatorship
Why and how do authoritarian regimes manage their image abroad?
Welcome New Ducks and an Invitation
The Duck has a new look and a new lineup of our core group, what we used to call "permanent contributors." We haven't yet settled on a new term. Blog Jedi Masters came to mind. In this post, I wanted to thank long-time contributors who are stepping away from the core group but who may blog intermittently and welcome some new folks to the core. I also want to invite a new cohort of folks to write for us regularly as Contributing Bloggers. Dan's Back!First, let me thank Dan Nexon for his artful return to the blog. His industry to carry out the site redesign is much appreciated. He founded this...
6+1 Questions about AMERICAN DOVE
American Dove makes pragmatic case for a dovish foreign policy. The use of force is a terrible foreign-policy instrument: it’s expensive and hardly ever works.
Light Summer Reading
Ah, those days when you did not feel guilty for reading something that does not contain the term “poststructuralism” and/or footnotes. Back in my teenage years, I used to devour all the books I could get during the summer. I had some favorites: Alexandre Duma’s The Count of Monte-Christo (1844-1846) and The Valley of the Moon (1913) by Jack London. If the Monte Christo long-drawn out revenge plot is a great motivational read for staying in academia, The Valley of the Moon was a type of a comfort read with its slow-paced love story/farming manual features. Following Paul Musgrave’s...
Is it time to abandon in-person academic conferences? or “Who’s kind of meh on going to APSA?”
I get the sense that lots of scholars are viewing the return (sooner or later) of in-person conference with a good deal of ambivalence. Is it time to take all conference online?
Getting Counterinsurgency Wrong
I just published a piece in Foreign Affairs, which draws on my new book, Bullets Not Ballots: Success in Counterinsurgency Warfare. After two decades, the United States is finally leaving Afghanistan, and only 2,500 U.S. troops remain in Iraq. In both countries, the insurgencies continue. It wasn’t supposed to end this way. In both wars, Washington hoped that imposing democratic reforms could protect the population, win hearts and minds, and defeat the insurgency. The approach didn't fail, I argue, because civilian and government officials botched its implementation. It was inherently...