I am posting this now for two reasons:
1) I am going to be at a conference for the next few days and the hotel apparently lacks wifi!
2) it is the anniversary of Youtube, which has made much of Friday Nerd Blogging possible.
Greetings all. PM and I are switching linkage duty.
- Omar Ali looks at the 2013 Pakistani election at 3QD.
- Tom Nichols argues against US ambiguity on Iran and North Korea.
- Via Alana Tiemessen: international justice infographics from the Leitner Center (pdf).
- North Korean piracy and maritime disputes in Northeast Asia.
- Juan Cole on mounting sectarian violence in Iraq.
- The nexus between authoritarian rule, collective action, and disaster response in China. For more on strategies of divide-and-rule in modern
empiresterritorially expansive composite states, see King et al. - Tom Pepinsky's "Notes on Long Form Research Blogging." I was a little surprised to see Tom's characterization of political-science scholar-blogs as "dissemination mechanism[s] for existing work." I think a lot of us, as well as the bloggers that he links to as examples, use the medium to work out ideas via short-form pieces. My World Politics review essay came into existence at the Duck, as well as some book chapters I've done on empires and liberalism. Kindred makes the same point in comments at Tom's place. Nonetheless, long-form research blogging is a different animal, and Tom has interesting things to say about his experience doing it.
- Speaking of Kindred, here's his take on Corey Robin's attempt to connect Austrian economic thought to Nietzsche.
And also:
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Good mornin'. Here's your linkage...
- Paolo Sorbello critiques the elegantly fixed steps and rhythms of the last Waltz.
- Roger Mac Ginty at Plato's Cave discusses the construction of "greatness" in IR and the cult of followership.
- Thomas Meaney tries to explain why a passionate history of global alternatives to liberal capitalism becomes an exercise in nostalgia.
- Jason Ralph wonders if Headley Bull's Revolt Against the West thesis is appropriate for understanding contemporary international society.
- Oliver Steunkel asks: "Could the BRICS provide loans without conditionalities?"
This weekend marks the debut of the next Star Trek movie: So Dark, Oh So Dark 2.
To mark the occasion:
Two years to go!
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- Syttende mai!
- Remembering Kenneth Waltz
- Erica Chenoweth and Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham put together a special issue of the Journal of Peace Research on nonviolence. (Free access through July 31).
- A New Deal for Fragile States: spoiler alert -- national leadership and ownership of agendas are key.
- In other IRS news -- don't F@#$ with adjuncts...
- 3-d printable drones in our future?
- Meanwhile, back in Syria: Could things get any worse?
- Michael Walzer sees dithering in Syria as an entirely rational response.
- Is the town of Qusayr next?
- Jon Lee Anderson on videos of atrocities in war.
and....
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With the semester coming to an end, time to hit the Internets and start blogging more regularly. I've been meaning to write one for months about the poaching crisis. It's coming. In the meantime, here is yet another story on the corrosive effects on governance by Sudanese elephant poachers in the Central African Republic.
Elsewhere, it's not been a good week for the Obama Administration but good news for team O, the media agree that the Benghazi mess has been overblown:
- David Brooks on the scapegoating of State Department hand Victoria Neuland
- Jeffrey Goldberg concurs that Susan Rice was not to blame
- Read the emails for your self
Daryl Morini, an IR PhD candidate at the University of Queensland whom I know, has put together an interesting global survey for undergraduate and graduate students of international relations. It looks pretty thorough and might make a pretty interesting student couter-point to TRIP. Eventually the goal is an article on our students’ attitudes toward the discipline; here is the full write-up of the project at e-IR. So far as I know, nothing like this has been done before (please comment if that is incorrect), so this strikes me as the interesting sort of student work we should support. Daryl’s made
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In between making organic cupcakes for my daughters’ school, completing a grant application, tending my organic vegetables, and finishing an R&R for a journal, I came across this little gem of a working paper (thanks to Freakonomics Blog).[1] This new research shows the following:
"Couples where the wife earns more than the husband are less satisfied with their marriage and are more likely to divorce. Finally, based on time use surveys, the gender gap in non-market work is larger if the wife earns more than the husband" (abstract).
Via a Facebook friend, an analysis of the sound and fury surrounding MOOCs by Aaron Bady:
Where this urgency comes from, however, might be less important than what it does to our sense of temporality, how experience and talk about the way we we are, right now, in “the MOOC moment.” In the MOOC moment, it seems to me, it’s already too late, always already too late. The world not only will change, but it has changed. In this sense, it’s isn’t simply that “MOOCs are the future,” or online education ischanging how we teach,” in the present tense. Those kinds of platitudes are chokingly [sic] omnipresent, but the interesting thing is the fact that the future is already now, that it has already changed how we teach. If you don’t get on the MOOC bandwagon, yesterday, you’ll have already been left behind. The world has already changed. To stop and question that fact is to be already belated, behind the times.
There's a striking similarity between this kind of rhetoric and early globalization discourse. Indeed, one of the best ways to force change is to argue that the transformation is already happening.
I very much recommend reading the whole piece and not simply the excerpts I've culled from it. Bady does a much better -- and more systematic -- job than I did of linking together what Kohen calls "edutainment," TED talks, and MOOCs. But among the many gems in the essay is this critical insight about MOOC discourse:
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The International Ethics section of the International Studies Association announces its annual book award competition for 2014. The award is given every year at the International Ethics section business meeting at the ISA Convention. Next year, the convention is in Toronto, March 26-29.
The prize will be an award of $200 along with a plaque to honor the author’s work.
Books eligible for the award must fall into the broadly defined category of international ethics. This includes, but is not limited to, books on international descriptive ethics, international normative ethics, metaethics, comparative ethics, international religious ethics, international political theory, and international legal theory. Books not clearly falling into one of the above categories may be considered if members of the Selection Committee agree that it is worthy of consideration. Eligible books can be either single- or multi-authored. Edited collections will not be eligible. Textbooks, translations and memoirs are not eligible. (Please see a list of past winners below.)
One of the traditional responsibilities of sane conservative parties is to write-out of respectability and legitimacy the scary, nut-job right-wing fringe. There can’t be a ‘no-enemies-on-the-right’ strategy, or you wind up with anti-Semites, racists, and black-helicopter guys grabbing all the media attention and delegitimizing wider conservative goals. In the US, Bill Buckley explicitly intended the National Review to screen out the John Birch Society and the American Mercury. In Germany, the CDU/CSU keeps the nationalist/neo-Nazi fringe at bay. (I worked for both GOP and CSU legislators in the past, so I’ve actually seen this in action. The late-night/AM newsradio listeners come out of the woodwork to tell you all about Jewish banker conspiracies and stuff like that.) In Japan, that means the LDP has to tamp down the endless Pacific War revisionism that keeps popping up. And for as much as I think Abenomics is an important Keynesian antidote to the right-wing monetarist-austerity hysteria of the last five years, it’s also increasingly clear that Abe’s victory allowed the Japanese version of the Birchers to get all sorts of air time they shouldn’t.
I've been deficient in serving your delicious, piping-hot links. I apologize. And to make matters worse, I have a very small selection of links today. But you can take solace in knowing that these are hand-crafted, artisanal links--the type of linkage that would make Henry Kissinger envious.
- The worst restaurant in America. Yes, this is a link to an episode of Kitchen Nightmares, but you'll find it gripping.
- Much like the owners of Amy's Baking Company in the Kitchen Nightmares episode above, is upset with its rankings. The PRC is trying to get the World Bank to cease ranking countries by business-friendliness.
- In The Chronicle: How do we tell students to drop our courses? And: how do you handle advisees who can't hack it?
- I'm a huge fan of The Mischiefs of Faction and of Seth Masket generally, but this post about Commodore Pike's dissertation was unfortunate on a day when we were all thinking about Man, the State, and War.
- The most heartening article I have ever read: Gans and Shepard (1994): "How Are the Mighty Fallen: Rejected Classic Articles by Leading Economists."
- I really, really like Perspectives on Politics, but I just want to say that I really, really wish that political science had journals like Journal of Economic Perspectives and Journal of Economic Literature. What do I mean? Accessible, high-quality, review and summation articles that communicate effectively to both experts and general audiences (including laymen).
- Via The Monkey Cage, what happens when political scientists stop being nice ... and start being political?
Ari Kohen on the value of "edutainment":
Finally, and most importantly, is the central claim that the test of education is whether or not it’s entertaining. Wales asks, “why wouldn’t you have the most entertaining professor, the one with the proven track record of getting knowledge into people’s heads?” Is there evidence that the most entertaining lecture is the one that gets “knowledge into people’s heads”? Again, I’m not suggesting that a boring lecture is going to do the trick, but I’m arguing that entertaining students doesn’t necessarily equate with teaching them something. When I lecture on Kant, I don’t think I’m really entertaining my students. In my opinion, Kant’s Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals doesn’t lend itself to entertainment; it’s a dense text that needs some serious explication. Now, I don’t speak in a monotone and I try to find relevant examples to help them make sense of the material, but I’m not standing in front of the class hoping that they’ll all have a great time; I’m standing there with the express purpose of teaching them about Kant.
The Theory Section seeks nominations for its new conference paper awards. All papers with a strong theoretical focus which were presented at the 2013 ISA conference in San Francisco are eligible. The Theory Section seeks to honor excellent work in theorizing international politics across the plurality of theoretical approaches. Two awards will be granted: one for a paper presented by a graduate student or other non-PhD holder, and another for a paper by a post-PhD scholar.
Kenneth Waltz died last night. From an email sent by Robert Jervis:
It is with great sadness that I have to report that Ken Waltz died last night. As many of you know, his health had been uncertain ever since he lost much of his sight a year ago, and about a month ago he was hospitalized with pneumonia. While he recovered enough to be discharged to rehab, a combination of a return of pneumonia and congestive heart failure sent him back to the hospital a few days ago.
He was a few weeks short of 89 but until the very end remained fully lucid and engaged. Indeed he was looking forward to a trip to the UK with his daughter-in-law in the fall, and the day before he went into the hospital had lunch with Les Gelb & Henry Kissinger (& remarked that the latter's age was showing). Despite being unable to see well enough to read, his spirits remained high until the end, which came quickly.
We will all miss him greatly both for his scholarship & his personality.
Here's you linkage (...in case you're still trying to avoid grading...)
- Manan Ahmed of Chapati Mystery fame has an op-ed in the New York Times on Pakistan's Tyrannical Majority.
- Praveen Swami asks whether it really matters to India who is the Prime Minister of Pakistan?
- Fahad Deshmukh did a wonderful little piece on Pakistan's election symbols. (Vote Bucket!)
- Shaik Ubaid argues that Bangladesh is heading for a religious civil war ever since a war crimes trial was politicized.
- Olga Khazan examines the collective action problem and charging a quarter per garment to improve worker safety in Bangladesh. (Assuming of course that the extra cost is actually spent on safety and not profits for the local manufacturer or bribes to the new building inspector...)
- Pankaj Mishra reminds Niall Ferguson and his ilk that the sun is at last setting on Britain's Imperial Myth.
- The Indian Navy has commissioned its first squadron of MiG-29K naval fighters. (Now if that aircraft carrier would just be delivered...)
- John Knefel asserts that everything you've been told about radicalization is wrong.
Newsweek Japan asked me to write an introductory essay for a special issue on tension in Northeast Asia. Basically I plea not to throw out all the remarkable growth of the last 35 years in an orgy of nationalism. It’s almost certain that the post-79 Asian peace was a necessary condition for simultaneous economic growth. So fighting over some empty rocks (Liancourt Rocks, Pinnacle Islands) is a terrible idea. And for IR, I think the current Sino-Japanese tension is a good test of the old liberal hypothesis that economic interdependence encourages peace. It’s fascinating to watch China especially try to figure out just how much economic gain to forego to push Japan over the Pinnacle Islands. Here we go:
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