Editor's Note: This is a guest blog by Jarrod Hayes, who is is an assistant professor of International Relations at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research broadly focuses on the social construction of foreign and security policy. It deals with the...
Regarding my previous post and the very useful comments, first the matter of what do we do once we realize that a policy problem in search of a policy solution is the equivalent of a social...
Today I presented some thoughts on Henry Farrell's International Studies Association panel on "Transnational Politics and the Information Age." The panel, which included Joe Nye, Dan Drezner, Marty...
My colleague, Matt Kroenig, has generated a ton of buzz (and not a little vitriol) for his Foreign Affairs piece in which he advocates imminent US military action against Iran. What's probably less...
Erik Voeten, one of my colleagues at Georgetown, writes at the Monkey Cage that:International relations, and especially (inter)national security, is the subfield of political science where the gap between policy makers and academics is most frequently decried. This is not because political science research on security is less policy relevant than in other subfields. Quite the contrary, it is because political science rather than law or economics is the dominant discipline in which policy makers have traditionally been trained. In short: there is more at stake.Erik takes as his point of...
Robert McNamara was complex giant in the field. Since his passing on Monday, several prominent IR scholars and practitioners have eulogized his life in a variety of ways. Most authors, however, note the disjointed nature of his legacy—great achievement in modernizing the Department of Defense, but also enormous failure in Vietnam. As someone often consumed by the power of numbers, for me McNamara's most compelling accomplishment was his dogged persistence in applying the quantitative approaches to management that garnered him great success at Ford Motor Company to the Department of Defense....
Perusing Drew Conway's excellent blog Zero Intelligence Agents in response to his comment on a previous post, I came across this post of his, reacting to Joseph Nye and Daniel Drezner's recent bloggingheads diavlog on the theory/policy debate.You can watch the relevant portion above, though Conway has summarized a key point: Drezner notes that quantitative scholars tend to have a 'imperialistic attitude' about their work, brushing off the work of more traditional qualitative research. To be exact, by "quantitative scholars" Drezner was referring to those who use "statistical methods and...