I’d like to begin with a bleg: I’m in the market for a platform that allows for easy screencasting. In other words, if you wanted to have 6 to 10 users simultaneously viewing a series of slides, but you thought that Google Hangout was just a little too laggy, what would you use? Comment below or email rpm47 atsign georgetown period edu.

• Via Inside Higher Ed, cell biologists slam the impact factor.
• Did a Fox News reporter hurt U.S. security by disclosing that Washington had a high-level DPRK mole? I thought this was the sort of thing conservatives believed was an exception to the First Amendment. (Also TPM, Jack Shafer) [Kevin Drum]
• China is preparing for war on the high seas; the U.S. Navy is prepared to bomb the Taliban, not men-o’-war [The Diplomat]
• Jay Ulfelder marks his beliefs to market and talks about how he got Syria wrong.
• Rafsanjani disqualified from running for Iranian presidency [Suffragio]

And also:

• Adobe is about to become as costly and as beloved as journal publishers: subscriptions to replace licenses for software. [Inside Higher Ed]

We still argue in favor of thinking about international-relations theory as dealing with “scientific ontologies”: “catalog[s]–or map[s]–of the basic substances and processes that constitute world politics.” As we note in both the final version and the working paper, this includes:

• The actors that populate world politics, such as states, international organizations, individuals, and multinational corporations;
• The contexts and environments within which those actors find themselves;
• Their relative significance to understanding and explaining international outcomes;
• How they fit together, such as parts of systems, autonomous entities, occupying locations in one or more social fields, nodes in a network, and so forth;
• What processes constitute the primary locus of scholarly analysis, e.g., decisions, actions, behaviors, relations, and practices; and
• The inter-relationship among elements of those processes, such as preferences, interests, identities, social ties, and so on.

Contributors are prohibited from posting further revisions online. But I thought I would share what we think the current landscape of international-relations theory looks like. Or, to clarify, what kind of a topography of implicit debates satisfies the following criteria:

• Reconstruct already existing terms of debate;
• Deal with more fundamental—and therefore much broader—concerns of scientific ontology than did the ‘isms’; and
• Involve gradations of disagreement rather that purport to describe self-contained theoretical aggregates.

The three clusters of basic scientific ontologies we flag are choice-theoretic, experience-near, and social-relational. The terms of contestation involve two questions.

First, “the degree that actors may be treated as autonomous from their social, cultural, and material environments—that actors are analytically distinguishable from the practices and relations that constitute them.” Choice-theoretic approaches tend to treat actors as autonomous from their environments at the moment of interaction, not so experience-near and social-relational alternatives.

Second, “the degree of thick contextualism—the commitment to theories that give analytic and explanatory primacy to specific features of the immediate spatial-temporal environment in which actors operate, with concomitant skepticism about generalizing or abstracting from particular contexts.” Experience-near approaches embrace thicker contextualism than either social-relational or choice-theoretic.

I am sure that, in the absence of the paper, this all seems pretty abstract.

In general, we choice-theoretic approaches as including expected-utility theory, some psychological approaches to decision-making, and much of what passes for “logics of appropriateness” work in the field. Experience-near approaches include aspects of the practice turn and what might be called the “new anthropology” in the field. Social-relational approaches include social-network analysis, some aspects of the practice turn — most notably those that focus on the positional and relational implications of social fields — and some forms of post-structural analysis.

As I’ve already suggested, these clusters of theories bleed into one another. Disagreements often involve matters of degree. Regardless, I offer this preview for readers’ consideration.

So here is a tribute to the Youtube anniversary:

• 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 empires territorially 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:

• HiLowBrow serializes W.E.B. Dubois’ science-fiction story, “The Comet.”
• Genre fiction, the long history of women in combat, and some other stuff.

It may, however, be appropriate to point out that the persisting bipolar conflict in the  field between humanists and behavioralists conceals a lively polemic within both camps  and perhaps particularly among the so-called  behavioralists. Among the modernists neologisms burst like roman candles in the sky, and wars of epistemological legitimacy are fought. The devotees of rigor and theories of the middle range reject more speculative general theory as  non-knowledge; and the devotees of general theory attack those with more limited scope as technicians, as answerers in search of questions.

From Gabriel Almond, “Political Theory and Political Science,” American Political Science Review 60,4 (1966), p. 878.

• 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?“

• Siddharatha Mitter reviews Max Fisher’s work and the cartography of bullshit.

To mark the occasion:

Two years to go!