As the world rushes to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic, international relations scholars have a lot to say. We are not public health experts, or pathologists. But we can speak to the way states respond to common threats and the political process needed to formulate...
I sometimes surprise people when I say that I have no idea what rational choice is.1 How can a game theorist say such a thing? Especially one who spends so much time on the internet arguing about...
I just completed a significant update of the international-relations theory syllabi collection. Although currently hosted at the Duck of Minerva, this collection is an initiative of the THEORY...
I want to remind interested parties that we've posted a call for suggestions for (1) the ISA Theory Section's "Distinguished Scholar" of 2014 and (2) the wording of the book prize. Vocal parties at...
In the last post, I discussed gender as a system of symbolic meanings. People understood to be "men" are often expected to be "masculine" and associated with masculinity/ies; while people understood to be "women" are expected to be feminine, and associated with femininity/ies. Traits associated with masculinities and femininities are often also transposed onto ideas, concepts, and things, in everyday life and in global politics. Masculinities and femininities are often salient in political, economic, and social life.But, like all good political "scientists," you ask the "so what?" question -...
Dear Dr. Journal Editor, As I mentioned in "Part I" of this letter, I "lost" this battle, and it matters to me.Why? Because it's not just "work" to me that happens to be on a particular topic because it is an interesting question. I believe all knowledge has a politics, acknowledged or not, and I acknowledge mine. I do feminist work because I'm interested in deconstructing gender hierarchies in IR as a discipline and in global politics more generally. I think that such a move would benefit everyone in IR/global politics, not just women (a category I'm not particularly fond of). I don't want...
(a letter I've thought about writing a dozen times over the last decade of being a feminist researcher)Dear Dr. Journal Editor, I submitted an article to your (big) journal in my (general) field. I don't know if it was of the quality to be published in your (spiffy) journal or not, but, to be honest, I was trusting you to figure that out. You betrayed my trust, and in spades. Your journal presents a pluralistic face, and lets in the occasional article that transgresses the norms of traditional social science. In fact, I do a lot of reviews for your journal and many journals like it ... I'm...
Not so much, argues Phil Arena, whose epistemological leanings are likely very far from my own (via John Sides).I'm inclined to agree; I also remain unclear if any of the other major subfields of International Relations (IR) can point to the existence of significant settled findings, whether correlative or causal. This matters, insofar as (some of the) major arguments for demarcating non-behavioral work from "political science" rest upon the putatively cumulative character of statistical and quasi-statistical work.But what if, rather than producing (non-trivial) settled knowledge, such work...
Daniel Drezner has expounded on his seminal "Zombies and IR" blog postwith a full spread on the topic in the July/August Foreign Policy:The specter of an uprising of reanimated corpses... poses a significant challenge to interpreters of international relations and the theories they use to understand the world. If the dead begin to rise from the grave and attack the living, what thinking would -- or should -- guide the human response? How would all those theories hold up under the pressure of a zombie assault? When should humans decide that hiding and hoarding is the right idea?What follows...
Does a video blog post satirizing a scholarly debate count as a contribution to that debate? This is the question I meant to pose when I chose to preface my remarks with a YouTube clip about academic bloggers on the ISA panel entitled “Do International Relations Blogs Inform Practice? Theory? Both? Neither?” Naturally, the equipment failed. So it wasn’t until Q&A when I had a chance to hit “play” – and then only in the context of a question about whether the kind of snark associated with blogging is good or bad for academic discourse. (The consensus position on the panel: a qualified "yes.")...
Having uploaded my quick-and-dirty video APSA presentation, I thought I might also upload some other movies I've made over the years relating to international-relations theory and topics. The four-part series showcased below is an extended video supplement I did for "Introduction to International Politics." I've used the same lecture, more or less, ever since. If anyone cares, the content comes after one I posted a long time ago on typifications and social facts.Part 1Part 2Part 3Part 4FYI, the images are all credited at the end.
Its hard to miss the prevailing idea that American hegemony is in a precipitous decline. Earlier this year, Parag Khanna was “Waving Goodbye to Hegemony” in a New York Times Magazine cover story. In Foreign Affairs, Fareed Zakaria recently argued that America needs fundamental reform if it is to avoid a precipitous fall from grace. There have been countless discussions of the “rise of China,” and a resurgent Europe and the loss of America’s edge—even NBA stars are crossing the pond for more lucrative deals in Euros!In the current World Affairs, Robert Lieber attacks the current phase of...