Maybe the problem isn’t that scholars don’t know how to speak to U.S. foreign-policy makers, but rather that U.S foreign-policy makers don’t know how to engage with scholarship?
Bridging the Gap to Nowhere?
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Recent Posts
6+1 Questions about Meddling in the Ballot Box
Dov Levin answers 6 (+1) questions about 2020 book on foreign electoral interference. When do great powers back a specific party or candidate in another country? Can they change the electoral outcome? Find out.
Why you should care about Biden’s new Religious Freedom Picks
A (very small) corner of the policy world got excited Monday afternoon: the Biden Administration announced its picks for top international religious freedom positions. This is an area I've worked in...
Dealing with the Digital Mob
Academics are increasingly becoming targets of online harassment, but too many universities and colleges are unprepared to support and protect their faculty. What steps should they take?
More Recent Posts
Sexism in Political Science, part II: The Very Least One Can Do
Last night, I posted this about sexism in political science. It has gotten a pretty strong response getting 10x as many hits (so far) as my usual post, lots of retweets by female political scientists, and some sharing on facebook. The sharing on facebook came with props as my female political...
You Are Doing It Wrong
The former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis (also a former colleague) has compared Greece's situation to "fiscal waterboarding" at the hands of its creditors. Thomas Piketty has accused Germany of forgetting its own post-World War II experience with debt relief. When I read some of the...
Civil(ian) Military Integration & The Coming Problem for International Law
In late May, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) released a white paper on China’s Military Strategy. This public release is the first of its kind, and it has received relatively little attention in the broader media. While much of the strategy is of no big surprise (broad and sweeping claims...
Sexism in Political Science
There is a discussion on PSR about sexism in political science, with most folks concurring that it is still an issue with some deniers pointing out that support groups for women are exclusive, too. Um, yeah. How to address such discussions? I go to my standard operating procedure: what have I...
Why Piketty Is Wrong about Debt Forgiveness
[UPDATE: This provides more detail and context than I do. Read it instead of, or at least in addition to, my post.] Thomas Piketty has decided that because Germany was the beneficiary of debt relief in 1953 that they should extend the same privilege to Greece today: When I hear the Germans say...
An American in Canada – Thoughts on Going Abroad for a Job
I never thought that when I started grad school I’d be relocating to another country. Then again, when I got the job in Canada, it did not really occur to me that I was “really” leaving the US – on my previous visits to Toronto, everything felt pretty familiar. Plus, as a scholar of transnational...
Greece: a Shakespearean Tragedy
In the Greek bailout episode the Greek government has been behaving much like the self-pitying Antonio from “The Merchant of Venice,” while the EU has been posing as a rather heavy-handed Shylock. Despite being aware of the damaging consequences of a Greek default and potential exit from the...
Organizing Collaborative Research Projects: Where Do I Begin?
The following is a guest post by Andrew Yeo at Catholic University of America. Collaborating with friends, colleagues, and other scholars is a great motivator for research. But if you’re at a small research university with limited institutional resources, the hurdles to do collaborative research...
NGO Power Shift 2.0
In her seminal 1997 article, Power Shift, Jessica Mathews argued that a power shift was underway in international politics marked by a redistribution of power from states to non-state actors—mostly businesses and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Almost two decades later, NGOs are trying to...
You Never Give Me Your Money/ You Only Give Me Your Funny Paper
I would like to cut through a lot of the rhetoric and discuss where we are with the Greece crisis and where we are likely to be quite soon. I will conclude with some thoughts as to why this has been an enormous failure on the part of Syriza and the intellectual left that has supported it, and it...
Free Data, Get Your Data Here
For the past two years, Jon Monten, Jordan Tama, and I have been working with the survey team at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs (Dina Smeltz and Craig Kafura) to revive the leader surveys that the Council used to run alongside their foreign policy opinion surveys of the American public....
Submit your proposal – ISA-Midwest 2015!
After you have seen the fall foliage at ISS-ISAC, why not see beautiful St. Louis, MO in November? ISA-Midwest - my FAVORITE conference - is November 19th - 22nd. Deadline for submissions is July 1st. This is a great conference for those interested in foreign policy or human rights themes....