The second installment of our live taping at the British International Studies Association annual…
Episode 33: Status? You Just Met Us!
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Recent Posts
Which will matter more, MESA’s BDS vote or the Negev Summit?
This has been either a bad week for Israel, or a great week for Israel, depending on whom you ask or what your Twitter feed looks like. In the end, this may matter more for the relevance and impact of Middle East studies than anything else.
6+1 Questions about Subversive Pedagogies
The volume calls on international-relations instructors to make use of “subversive pedagogies” — ones that embrace a more holistic understanding of teaching. It invites academics to interrogate what we teach, how we teach, where we teach, and whom we teach.
A Tale of Two Interviews: IR Theory and the Russian Invasion of Ukraine
Two recent interviews in the New Yorker have received substantial attention in recent weeks. Unfortunately, taken together, they make the IR discipline look terrible. How can IR theorists demonstrate their discipline’s relevance in the face of rapidly changing historical events?
More Recent Posts
Teaching about Death and Violence: Thoughts from a Professor Who Calls Nevada Home
After the horrific attack in Las Vegas on Sunday, 1 October, the question of knowledge should be key to our understanding of this event. What do we know? What can we recall? The first thing that comes to mind is likely numbers, statistics, values attributed to life. We know now that the death toll...
The Poverty of Style in IR
As one of the new Ducks, I will from now on be posting diversely on a range of topics including political violence, the status of critique in IR, and professional issues that will be of particular interest to early career scholars and PhD students. For my first post, however, I want to write about...
Puerto Rico: What did the delay in the response to Hurricane Maria mean?
Last night, I tried to dig in and understand whether and how the response to Hurricane Maria was delayed. I wrote a Tweetstorm that I Storify-ed below. I wanted to see what evidence if any supported those claims and in what ways a swifter and larger response potentially could have addressed some...
Darkness Falls in Cambodia
This Bridging the Gap post is by BTG co-director Naazneen H. Barma, who also serves as Associate Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School. Hun Sen, the longtime leader of Cambodia, has used almost every tool in the authoritarian playbook to consolidate his grip on...
The Rise of the Trauma State: Afghanistan and America’s Unwinnable War
This is a guest post by Erik Goepner, a visiting research fellow at the Cato Institute. During his earlier military career, he commanded units in Afghanistan and Iraq. He is currently a doctoral candidate at George Mason University, and his main research interests include civil war, trauma, and...
What Just Happened in the German Elections?
This is a guest post by Hanna Kleider, an assistant professor in the Department of International Affairs at the University of Georgia. She is currently on a research leave at the European University Institute in Florence. Her main research interests are comparative politics and political economy,...
Magic Lines and Escalate Ladders
A colleague asked me if there will be war between the US and North Korea. I said maybe, which is pretty damned scary, given the likely consequences. Why am I worried? Basically for two reasons that intersect in bad ways, besides the Trumpiness and KJU-ness factors: the US seems awfully...
On Catalonia’s referendum: Groupthink and strategic essentialism as the enemies of democracy
Last Sunday, I was having a walk around the city centre of Cambridge when I saw a demonstration of around 50 people rallying for their right to vote in a referendum for independence from Spain. They were joining other demonstrations of Catalan separatists that took place all around Europe and in...
Coffee and TV
I am (sort of) on vacation and visiting the Motherland. In the meantime, I allowed myself a couple of days of couch potato mode that included some Russian TV. A political scientist in me is never on holiday so while flipping through some mainstream channels I made a little Russian TV digest for...
Myanmar: The Responsibility to Protect is Working Exactly As It Was Supposed To
This is a guest post from Aidan Hehir, a Reader in International Relations at the University of Westminster. He has published widely in a number of academic journals including International Security, The Journal of Peace Research, Ethics and International Affairs, and Cooperation and Conflict. He...
The Book Nook: The CIA and the Politics of US Intelligence Reform
Today we begin the Bridging the Gap "Book Nook," a series of short videos describing new books by scholars in the BTG network. For the first entry, our very own Brent Durbin discusses his book, The CIA and the Politics of US Intelligence Reform (Cambridge, 2017). (We hope to do a bunch of these,...
The Case Against “The Case For Colonialism”
This is a guest post by Sahar Khan, a visiting research fellow in the Cato Institute’s Defense and Foreign Policy Department. Sahar holds a PhD in political science from the University of California, Irvine. Follow her at @khansahar1. The Third World Quarterly (TWQ), a reputable academic journal...