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 college. She eventually chose Bryn Mawr and she talks about what an ...
ess than a year after the appearance of "The False Promise of International Institutions," the journal International Security published replies from Robert Keohane and Lisa...
Professor Francois Debrix of Virginia Tech University joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast. Francois grew up in France, attending college there with degrees in Spanish and English, and then...
For decades, many International Relations (IR) scholars portrayed experiments with foreign policy elites as too risky, too costly, or too difficult to implement. Faculty mentors discouraged graduate...
Trump is not a wolf in sheep’s clothing, or even a wolf in wolf’s clothing. Trump is a wolf in no clothing. His campaign, transition, and inaugural weekend lay naked the two driving forces of his presidency. The first is an authoritarian disregard for the truth—what we used to call “lying” in the good old days when facts were facts. And though bold-faced lying makes for hilarious Saturday Night Live skits (which these days write themselves), it’s dangerous when it comes with attacks on the press and political opponents. What the Trump administration is doing is the first step towards...
The following is a guest post by Sidra Hamidi, a PhD Candidate in Political Science at Northwestern University, specializing in global nuclear politics and state identity. She has published previously in the Washington Post and E-International Relations. In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election to the highest office in the United States, many observers have heralded the beginning of an era of “post-truth” in which “facts” are under attack from “opinions” at best and “lies” at worst. Oxford Dictionary named “post-truth” its word of the year, and Ruth Marcus even referred to “post-truth”...
One of the most poignant moments of Barack Obama’s presidency was his eulogy for those murdered in the massacre at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. In the pulpit of that historic black church that served as a civil rights era sanctuary, and where a white racist extremist murdered nine African American parishioners who had just welcomed him, President Obama, America’s first black president, began to slowly sing Amazing Grace--a song often sung as an anthem of spiritual perseverance in the black church. A church filled with mostly black mourners followed. No one else...
Larry Summers, I’m going to have to disagree with you. It may seem a bit of a mismatch. Summers is a provocative and influential guy: Chief Economist at the World Bank, Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton, Director of the National Economic Council under Obama, former president of Harvard University. He helped craft US policy in response to the Global Financial Crisis and international responses to financial problems in Mexico, Asia, and Russia in the 1990s. I, on the other hand, am a random academic whose best-selling book has finally cracked the top 500,000 on Amazon and whose office is...
The following is a guest post by Jahara W. Matisek. Jahara “FRANKY” Matisek is a Major in the U.S. Air Force, with plenty of combat experience flying the C-17 and an instructor pilot tour in the T-6. He is an AFIT Ph.D. Student in Political Science at Northwestern University, a recent Summer Seminar participant in the Clements Center for National Security, and Coordinator for the War & Society Working Group at the Buffett Institute. Upon completion of his doctoral studies, Major Matisek will be Assistant Professor in the Military & Strategic Studies department at the U.S. Air Force...
It won't be too long before we start to get a better understanding of what foreign policy in a Trump Administration will actually look like. It's useful to keep in mind that current rhetoric is no guarantee of future grand strategy. Remember when we all worried that the Bush Administration was going to be too isolationist? Good times. But let's assume, for a moment, that the past is prologue. Or the prologue is the main part of the book. Or whatever. This raises an interesting puzzle: what the $@!#* • #!*$$%*(!! is he doing? Seriously. What the !#(&--^&!# stupid #$#(*$!! is going on?...
Amidst all the political drama this week, one could be forgiven for not noting the 25th anniversary of the Chapultepec Peace Agreement. Chapultepec was the agreement that brought a negotiated end to El Salvador’s civil war, a 12-year conflict between a repressive military government and leftist rebels united under the banner of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). The Salvadoran conflict was notable for its tremendous human cost. By the conflict’s end, over a million people had been internally displaced or fled abroad and an estimated 75,000 Salvadorans were killed, many of...
Happy Birthday to Dr. Martin Luther King! In his honor here is his favorite singer, the majestic Mahalia Jackson, singing the theme song for the civil rights movement--"We Shall Overcome." After that I've posted Dr. King's soul shaking spoken word reflection on that song. All together they're five minutes long and well worth a listen. Mahalia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTyKJjj2oC0 Martin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=130J-FdZDtY