Jarrod is joined by Daniela Lai and Adam Lerner to talk about the role of big questions in IR scholarship and teaching.
Does IR ask big questions?
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Featured
5 Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me in Grad School: A Smorgasbord
In a recent panel organized by Ashley Leeds and the Women in Conflict Studies (WICS) group, I had a chance to reflect on some things I wish someone had told me while I was getting my Ph.D. The...
Elite-Public Gaps and Deadlock on the Iran Deal
While campaigning for the White House, U.S. President Joe Biden promised Americans that he would reenter the nuclear deal with Iran, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan...
A Piece of the Puzzle: The Relative Importance and Unimportance of Academic Contributions to the Policy Process
Academic research can go a long way to shape the debate or can have no effect at all. The problem is that scholars don’t know – and may never know – how their work has been received by policymakers and whether it steered a policy decision in a good or bad direction.
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Mind the Power Gap
I have new online piece, co-authored with Dani Nedal, at Foreign Affairs: President Donald Trump believes that America makes terrible deals—from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Why, according to Trump, do other countries take such advantage of the United States? Because our leaders and officials are stupid and incompetent and are terrible negotiators. “Free trade can be wonderful if you have smart people. But we have people that are stupid,” said Trump when he announced his decision to run for president. On immigration, he...
Tempo, Protest, and Emergency Ethnography in the Trump Moment
This is a guest post by Dr. Sherrill Stroschein, Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Politics, Department of Political Science, University College London We have all been driven to understand what is going on over the past few days. Some of these discussions would be improved with lesser-used tools to think more systematically about events. There are three approaches that can help to do this that have had less exposure than they should. The first is more attention to time, pace, and tempo. In coming on strong and quickly with his orders, Trump is using a pace that is unusual for...
Party Trumped Policy in 2016
This is a guest post by Christopher Gelpi and Elias Assaf. Christopher Gelpi is Chair of Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies and Professor of Political Science and Elias Assaf is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at The Ohio State University, both at The Ohio State University President Donald Trump adopted a variety of controversial and unorthodox foreign policy stances during the 2016 presidential campaign. Since taking office, Mr. Trump has moved quickly to begin implementing many of these policies – including a border wall...
Trump to Omran: Die, Kid
Just facts, no opinions. Brutal facts. Today, the President of the United States issued an order that stops our country from admitting this boy as a refugee. This is Omran Daqneesh, a five year old Syrian boy who was almost killed last summer when Syrian warplanes bombed his house in Aleppo. This picture was taken by medics who pulled Omran from the rubble after the attack. Omran's brother was killed in the bombing. You probably saw this on the news last summer, when the attack on Omran and his family received a lot of coverage. The reason the President issued an order that bars our country...
Preliminary Notes on Progressive Foreign Policy in the Age of Trump
I apologize for inflicting this on you all, but I've found that blogging helps me think through ideas and questions—especially given the Duck's readership. So, without further introduction, here are some half-baked notes on Progressive foreign policy. Preliminaries The 2016 primary contest highlighted the general atrophy of progressive foreign-policy thought and infrastructure. Virtually the entire left and liberal foreign-policy apparatus lined up behind Clinton, whether because of affinity, hope for employment and fear of retaliation, or out of the calculation that she was the only viable...
Donald Trump is Nothing but a Bad Nixon Remake
The following is a guest post by Dani Nedal, PhD Candidate at Georgetown University and Predoctoral Fellow at Yale University. The surprising political ascent of Donald Trump has prompted two contradictory reactions. One is the impulse to declare Trump, and everything about him, “unprecedented” (nay, unpresidented!). The other is to search through history for the appropriate analogies that help explain his rise to power and prepare us for his presidency. Comparisons have been drawn with Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and distant figures like Caligula. Others reject the fascism angle and compare...
It Works on 24 but Not in Real Life: Peer-Reviewed Evidence That Torture Will Increase Terrorism
Dear My Not-So-Fictional Family Members of Facebook, Greetings. We really haven’t hung out since that family reunion in 1996 but it’s been great to reconnect on Facebook. I love the pictures of your dog and it’s cool to see how much you now look like our grandfather. We have different political beliefs; I think we both know that now. I’ve turned into one of those Birkenstock-wearing liberals who likes science and “wastes my time” marching for rights that you think women already have. Your political beliefs are the polar opposite of that and today you’ve expressed how happy you are that...
Trump’s Treatment of the Press: A Harbinger of Bad Things to Come
Over the weekend, the Trump Administration had some interesting discussions with and about the press. First, talking at CIA headquarters on Saturday, President Trump remarked that he is in a “war” with reporters, who are the “most dishonest human beings on Earth.” Later that same day, his Press Secretary, Sean Spicer, accused the media of “shameful and wrong” reporting on the unbigly audience sizes at the inauguration. And, in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Trump Senior Advisor Kellyanne Conway not only spoke of “alternative facts” about the inauguration’s audience size...