In 2015, Linus Hagström, a professor of political science at the Swedish Defence University, questioned the wisdom of Sweden joining NATO in a coauthored opinion piece. After its publication, some of his colleagues, especially those in the Swedish military,...
Like a lot of academics, I love Google n-grams, but not as much as the digitized archive Google uses to produce it. It’s a great warren of rabbit holes – even better than wikipedia – and I often...
Professor Duncan Bell joins The Hayseed Scholar podcast. Duncan grew up in the Midlands in a rural area of England. He was interested in international politics from a fairly young age. Duncan chose...
When it comes to quantitative data in conflict studies, standards for collection, reliability, ethics, and usage remain behind the curve. We discuss five things that scholars can do to address these gaps.
Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Inanna Hamati-Ataya. It is the second  installment in our "End of IR Theory" companion symposium for the special issue of the European Journal of International Relations. SAGE has temporarily ungated all of the articles in that issue. This post responds to the introduction (PDF), written by Tim Dunne, Lene Hansen and Colin Wight. Their own post is available here. Other entries in the symposium--when available--may be reached via the "EJIR Special Issue Symposium" tag. The EJIR Special Issue is not only a new opportunity to collectively reflect on the...
Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Tim Dunne, Lene Hansen and Colin Wight. It is the first installment in our "End of IR Theory" companion symposium for the special issue of the European Journal of International Relations. SAGE has temporarily ungated all of the articles in that issue. This post refers to the issue's introduction of the same name (PDF). A response, authored by Inanna Hamati-Ataya, will appear at 10am Eastern. Other entries in the symposium--when available--may be reached via the "EJIR Special Issue Symposium" tag. In an academic discipline as wide-ranging as...
It is with great pleasure that I announce the start of a special collaboration among the European Journal of International Relations, SAGE Journals, and the Duck of Minerva: The "End of IR Theory" Symposium. A number of developments over the past few years spurred Colin Wight, Lene Hansen, and Tim Dunne to dedicate a special issue of EJIR to the subject of the state of International Relations (IR) theory. If all goes smoothly, that issue has been released and will be ungated for the next month. The Duck of Minerva is publishing a companion symposium. Our aim? To spur discussion, provoke...
A few unconnected recent happenings have reminded me that I've meant to do a short post on Charles Tilly, bellocentric (or "bellicist") theories of state formation, and where all of this stands in 2013. If you mention "Charles Tilly" and "state formation" to knowledgeable social scientists, their first association is almost always his famous line "war made the state and the state made war" (PDF). Scholars most frequently cite his work on state formation in the service of this line of argument.* Indeed, Tilly's argument also invariably gets translated into "more war, more state." This strikes...
We should stop using the term “isolationism” to describe policies tht entail a more restrained U.S. role in the world.