If you spent the entire Friday night and Saturday glued to the news about Prigozhin's armed rebellion, you are either an IR-head, a Russia-watcher or the Ukrainian army running out of popcorn. The avalanche of hot-takes about the start of a civil war, theoretical...
I was an enlisted Airman studying Korean at the Defense Language Institute (DLI) in Monterey, California on September 11, 2001. When the first two planes struck, none of us had any idea whether it...
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...
The awfulness of 2020 has become one of the year’s most unforgettable cultural memes.
I hinted at some politics when discussing the longest recorded sniper shot in history. That the Canadian government might not love this news because it would remind folks that there are Canadians engaged in combat in Iraq. And now, ta da: In a letter Friday to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, [NDP leader Thomas] Mulcair says the incident "seriously calls into question your government's claim that Canadian forces are not involved in direct combat in Iraq." "Will you now confirm that Canadian troops have engaged in ground combat since your government took office?" he...
The Trump Administration's proclamation of "alternative facts" to suit the arguments they wish to make, and the branding of journalistic outlets that demonstrate the inaccuracy of the President's statements as "FAKE NEWS!!!" have prompted me to do something I am not normally inclined to do: to actively campaign for the value and integrity of a broadly scientific approach as an important input to public deliberation. It's not at all that I needed to be convinced of the value of such an approach; rather, it's that I was somewhat blissfully unaware of the extent to which the current wave of...
In 2013, Bannon is reported to have told Ron Radosh of the Daily Beast that he was a Leninist. He is quoted as saying “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.” Yet this is such an odd thing to tell someone, particularly a journalist, when one’s very wealth, political power and caché depend on the very institution that he wants to destroy. Lenin, after all, wanted to bring down capitalism and the bourgeoisie to usher in the proletariat as leaders of a communist government and society. ...
This World Politics in a Time of Populist Nationalism (WPTPN) guest post is written by Antje Wiener, Professor of Political Science and Global Governance at the University of Hamburg, visiting fellow at the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law at Cambridge University (September - December 2016), and 2015-2017 holder of the "Opus Magnum Fellowship" funded by the Volkswagon Foundation. She is founding editor of the Cambridge University Press journal Global Constitutionalism: Democracy, Human Rights and the Rule of Law and her book Contestation and Constitution in Global Governance is...
It's the eternal quandary of thinking about the intersection of international politics and global health: where does Elton John fit in? We now have an answer. It's where we try to understand issues of moral and legal responsibility of an international organization. About a month ago, I wrote about cholera and global health. One of the reasons cholera is such a big issue is because of the ongoing outbreak in Haiti—the worst in recent history, and one that we can directly trace to the 2010 earthquake and Hurricane Matthew in October. Natural disasters can obviously disrupt the sanitation...
This World Politics in a Time of Populist Nationalism (WPTPN) guest post is written by Gizem Zencirci, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Providence College. Her research interests include political Islam, neoliberalism and social policy, and Middle East politics. The rise of the AK Party in Turkey and its consolidation of power is a case with generalizable lessons about the rise of populist nationalism elsewhere. Before and after the U.S. election, many commentators noted potential similarities between Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s administration and a potential presidency of Donald...
There are many reasons to be concerned about world politics. Over the coming weeks and months the Duck of Minerva will run a series of posts from regular contributors as well as guests on the state of the world and our possible futures. We will explore the implications of the rise of nationalist populism on international relations, international political economy, foreign policy, global institutions, and comparative political systems. Daniel Nexon has already posted on the need to buttress domestic and international institutions; other posts will follow in the coming days. We invite...
So this is ostensibly an academic blog, though there is something quite confessional and personal about the blog format. I suspect many readers of the Duck are experiencing what I'm feeling, which is profound heartache over the election results. I've been writing on Facebook and trying to grieve and process with others, but I've got to stop. Life has to go on, and other urgent writing and work require my attention. Still, I thought I'd share some of those reflections here, for what it is worth. I've refrained from partisan blogging here, though was profoundly opposed to the kind of campaign...