Yesterday, I had the chance to participate in the Bridging the Gap workshop led by Bruce Jentleson. It is an effort every summer to help younger scholars figure out how to engage the policy world in a variety of ways, including figuring out how to write and publish...
Online mediums can be perceived as attracting wacky ranters unrepresentative contributors and exchanges and, therefore, forums or chats are often treated as if they do not provide an effective...
Editor's note: this post first appeared on my personal blog. As some of you may know, I'm up for tenure this year, and it's not going to work out. I don't want to get into the details of anything...
The ISA mess is the gift that keeps on giving. Now Nicholas Kristof has written a piece in his NYT column that "addresses" the controversy. The problem is that the column is out of date. Not just...
Here is part one, where I noted Walt, the Duck, and Walter Russell Mead as the IR blogs I read almost always despite the avalanche of international affairs blogs now. Here are a few more: Martin Wolf: Here’s a grad school education in IPE, op-ed by op-ed, better day-to-day than either Krugman or the Economist. Not being an economist, but facing regular student questions for years about the Great Recession and the euro-zone crisis, I have found Wolf indispensible in explaining what happened in the last 5 years – and without that ‘bankers as masters of the universe’ schtick coming from CNBC,...
If there is one constant to modern social science, it is that you are always under-read. There is always some critical book you missed, some article you never had time for, some classic of which you only read the first and last chapters in grad school. And this is just the modern work immediately relevant to your field. After college you all but gave up on reading the ‘great books’ in the Chicago sense – Plato, Augustine, Mill, Nietzsche, etc. That’s the stuff that really got you interested in social analysis – you’ve still got a marked up copy of Aristotle’s Politics somewhere - but if you...
Being new to the blogging world, I have been thinking a lot about the utility and influence of blogs. Blogs seem appealing in so many ways. They appear to be an effective means of disseminating facts and views quickly to a wide audience, facilitating timely responses to emerging policy issues (and other fun pop politics). At the same time, blogging is a way of discussing real intellectual ideas free of many of the pitfalls of peer review and academic publishing (see last week's Duck entry by Brian Rathbun). More importantly, blogging is concise, pithy and entertaining and can potentially...
Later this week, I will be participating in a roundtable discussion with my esteemed colleagues Juan Cole, Manan Ahmed, Joshua Foust and Madiha Tahir on "The Blogs of War: The Analytical Terrain of the Af-Pak Blogosphere" at the annual conference on South Asia at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.For my contribution to this discussion, I have been scouring blogs from US/ISAF soldiers in Afghanistan. (I ignored the glossier blogs which are mainly exercises in official public relations and propaganda). Since I am up to my eyeballs reading blogs posts, I thought I would share a few...
In addition to being blown away by the recent Duck facelift (ht to Dan), you may have also noticed a slight shuffling in the roster. Congratulations to Stephanie Carvin, Laura Sjoberg, Vikash Yadav, all of whom are now officially (to quote Stephanie) "perma-ducks." Some of our other guest bloggers have stepped aside for now. We are grateful to Tony Lang, Mlada Bukovansky, Drew Conway, Daniel McIntosh and Craig Hayden for their contributions to the Duck over the past year of transitions, and wish them the best. Many will continue to write at their other fabulous blogs, and we'll continue to...
Since I blogged about Journolist here in March 2009, I thought my followup (confessional) was worth mentioning now.
A few days ago, Charli pondered "whether or not the Internet and social media empowers civil society or instead simply offers states new tools of repression and governance." And she provided a link to an excellent video about Iranian bloggers. I haven't been able to get the question or the video out of my head. This is not my topic/area of research, but I will offer a few tentative thoughts to see if it will spark some discussion...What color is your burqa?If we were to visualize the Internet, would we not see a vast social space populated by individuals (men and women) wearing burqas,...
Random connections between things: Today, I'm at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy giving a guest lecture on global advocacy networks, in a class on Statecraft taught by my colleague Dan Drezner, who has an article coming out in the next issue Brown Journal of World Affairs on whether or not the Internet and social media empowers civil society or instead simply offers states new tools of repression and governance. Then, with all that freshly bobbing around in my mind, my doctoral student sent me this video, which speaks to the same question of whether social media primarily empowers...