As many of our readers know, I am the incoming editor-in-chief of International Studies Quarterly, the “flagship journal” of the International Studies Association. My team will begin to take new submissions in October. The full handoff occurs in January of 2014. The scope and nature of the responsibilities involved are inconsistent with an active presence here. Indeed, my time-management and logistical skills are insufficient to support both activities. Thus, I will be phasing out of my various roles at the Duck of Minerva over the next few weeks.

In practice, this means that my last major contribution to the Duck of Minerva will our upcoming symposium on the European Journal of International Relations‘ “End of IR Theory” special issue. I also expect that I will be posting some reflections on nine years of blogging and on the evolution of the Duck of Minerva. I don’t know how much interest there will be on these subjects, but writing about them will provide me with a sense of closure.

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I expect that our readers have seen Brian’s public letter of resignation, as well as Charli’s personal take on all this and Steve’s  discussion of the perils and rewards of blogging. This is a choice that Brian made on his own recognizance, one that he announced to the other permanent contributors in an email exchange.

Many of the emails that I’ve received since Thursday have expressed some combination of puzzlement, anger, dismay, and unhappiness at the absence of a collective statement from the Duck of Minerva. The general argument is that a blog of the Duck of Minerva‘s “stature” and “reach” must take a collective stance on Brian’s most recent post and on concerns about a pattern of sexist content in his work. Continue reading

Sometime in my first year of blogging, I read on the Internets that President Mugabe’s troops had burned a six-year-old alive in front of
his parents. I was horrified, it was late, I was tired and already pissed off at something completely unrelated, and I foolishly fired off a blog post provocatively entitled “Why Not Assassinate Mugabe?”

The point of the post, actually, was that there are a whole bunch of really good reasons why the anti-assassination norm exists and holds in such cases. But naturally no one paid any attention to that, and by the time I woke up I had been called out for inciting violence against a head of state. After watching the comments and blog responses pour in the next morning I checked with my co-bloggers about what to do. Should I remove the post?  Edit the post? Reply to the comments? Ignore them and move on? Resign?

It was a learning moment for me as a blogger, but it was also a small constitutive moment in the (at that time) gradually expanding Duck community’s process of figuring out our collective rules of thumb for dealing with mistakes, hot-button moments, or outright gaffes.  Continue reading

I have decided, following the controversy surrounding my post on networking, to remove myself as one of the permanent contributors to the Duck of Minerva. Through poorly chosen and ill-considered language and images, I made light of women’s challenges both in their academic and in their daily lives, for which I am deeply sorry. I don’t want to get in the way of other people doing good work on important topics on the site. In the future, I will diligently and sincerely work towards educating myself on the unique experiences of women in academia and pass those lessons on to others. I will attempt to regain your trust.

The Duck of the Minerva has rightly become regarded as the best blog for international relations academics and others looking for guidance on contemporary policy issues. Readers would be well served by continuing to read it. To have tarnished the Duck was a great mistake. I was proud to be a part of it, and I wish you all well.

Brian Rathbun

I am delighted to report that Steve Saideman, Robert Kelly and Megan MacKenzie will be joining the ranks of permanent Duck contributors as of today.

This leaves room for new guest bloggers: Stacie Goddard, Johannes Urpelainen and Jillian Schwedler. Continue reading

No, we’re not having avian problems. Rather, we know that our archives are littered with artifacts of conversion: visible code, weird blockquoting, and so on. So, the plea: if you come across anything like this, please email me with the post link so that I can edit it.

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Update: the Duck has moslty migrated (and that sentence makes sense in a non-technical context! Score!). Comment migration is in process, so probably not a good time for a magnum opus response. The existing RSS feed should work, so no need to change that.

Vikash designed our new banner.

The template is likely to shift some over the next week or so. Let us know about missing functionality, aestehic issues, and other stuff. Obviously, FB, Twitter, etc. integration is missing but will be around soon.

Update 2: Apparently the template is being played with. So disregard relevant earlier comments.

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Howdy!

We are in the process of a long-delayed WordPress migration.

It turns out Laura Sjoberg is pretty handy with the coding, and so she’s doing a ton of work to make sure this goes as smoothly as possible.

There will be no substantive content updates this weekend, and we do not expect any until the migration is complete.

Thanks to all our sharp-witted, incisive, and supportive readers. We will do our best to make the readership experience as seamless as possible, but we do expect some hiccups.

We will keep you all posted.