Like millions of other people around the world, I have spent much of the past few weeks playing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (TotK), the nineteenth installment in Nintendo’s widely acclaimed series.
In 2014, John Mearsheimer authored a Foreign Affairs article in which he blamed that year’s Ukrai…
Back in the Duck of Minerva's heyday, Jon Western was one of its anchors. Indeed, it wasn't that long ago that we were talking about his returning. Jon said that he'd gained important perspective on...
Is Constructivism best understood as a scholarly disposition, a body of theory, or an intellectua…
This piece is written by Bridging the Gap co-Director Naazneen H. Barma, Director of the Scrivner Institute of Public Policy, Scrivner Chair, and Associate Professor at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. It was commissioned as part of the "Represent" series on diversity, inclusion and representation in the national security sphere, an initiative of Defense 360 of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Defense 360 and the Duck of Minerva agreed to cross-post the piece in order to ensure wide reach to both academic and...
In September, the UAE and Israel signed "the Abraham Accords," normalizing relations between the UAE and Israel. The Trump Administration presented this as if it was equivalent to the Camp David Accords, a ground-breaking peace agreement that would transform the world. Much of the Middle East policy community, however, met it with a shrug. I'm not sure I'm joining in on that shrug. While it's true Trump exaggerated and misrepresented the deal, as he is wont to do, I worry a sneaky "common wisdom" has developed among observers that may obscure the significant impacts of this agreement. The...
Last night’s debate might go down as one of the greatest in recent memory, and I am prepared to die on that hill. It was ugly. But it was also raw, unfiltered, and honest. It was thin on policy substance which is why I think the majority of my Twitter feed thought it was a shitshow.[1] A few things stood out which I think are worth mentioning, even on an IR blog. The performances last night got me thinking a lot about game theory. I am not a game theorist, and if I were, I would not subject you to a model of this year’s electoral strategy by Teams Trump and Biden. (I doubt the game theorists...
Professor Julie Kaarbo (U. of Edinburgh) discusses role theory, the relationship between FPA and IR theory, and a new project she is calling Breaking Bad. As always thanks go to Steve Dancz (https://stevedancz.com) for our theme music.
Professor Julie Kaarbo discusses Foreign Policy Analysis.
I'm working on a new project about the use of religion in power politics (part of which I'll be presenting "at" APSA this week). I'm finding good evidence, but the framing is tricky. Religion as a power political tool happens, and matters, but it rarely works out the way the wielders intended. Is this an example of ideas mattering in international relations, or an example of their limits? The fact that I feel forced into such a binary reflects a broader issue in the sub-field. As we all learn in Intro to IR, the study of ideas revolves around constructivism. With the emergence of neorealism...
The artist Rufina Bazlova has used traditional embroidery to describe current events in Belarus This past weekend, two European capitals witnessed large-scale protests. Both of them protested against the government, both carried the flags that once symbolized their state, in both cases the police was involved, and during one of them the crowd was chanting “Putin! Putin!”. If you think the latter happened in Minsk you are sadly mistaken: the crowd in Belarus is much more creative than the Neo-Nazi conspiracy theorists in Berlin. The 38,000-strong crowd in Berlin was doing yoga against German...
Whether scholars embed policy recommendations in their work is a flawed measure of whether work is policy-relevant. Across a series of articles and book chapters, Michael Desch and Paul Avey have argued international relations scholarship is declining in policy relevance, with IR scholars falling into what Stephen Van Evera has called a “cult of the irrelevant”: a hermetically-sealed professional community that values technique and internal dialogue over broader societal and political relevance. As evidence, they cite data demonstrating a marked decline in the frequency...