Consider this a prompt for an open thread.
I'm looking for books to recommend to students to both give them a hint of what academic political science is "really" like but also to get them excited about the systematic study of politics. No single book can do it all, but a summer reading list can at least prod people to look in the right areas. So here's my list; additions welcome.
- Putnam and Campbell, American Grace: Fascinating survey of religion and politics in American life
- Cohen, Karol, Noel, and Zaller, The Party Decides: Who makes presidents and why?
- Gelman, Park, Bafumi, and Shor, Red State, Blue State: Why do people vote the way they do? Why are some states red and some states blue?
- James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How do ideas constitute and guide state policy?
- James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: Taking anarchism seriously.
- Acemoglu and Robinson, Why Nations Fail
- Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: The states system we take for granted wasn't the inevitable or even the only conclusion of European state-making
- Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: Sweeping descriptions of how politics made and unmade American society--and a reminder that political contestation isn't teleological.
- BDM and Smith, The Dictator's Handbook: Thinking like a bad guy.
- John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics: Few scholars have written such an approachable, provocative, and erudite book.
- Richard Ben Cramer, What It Takes: Gripping.
- Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State, and War: Worth re-reading. Most successful comps outline in the history of academia.
- Michael Ross, The Oil Curse. The definitive statement of a generation of the resource curse research project.
- Please Vote For Me: School politics with a twist. Is 'picky eating' a valid decision rule?
- Street Fight. I think this was supposed to make me like Cory Booker, but I had the opposite reaction.
And:
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Something extraordinary happened in Europe this week. Enrico Letta, Italy's Prime Minister nominee, upon being tapped to form the next government made a bold press conference announcement that his primary objective upon taking office will be to end Italy's austerity program and join other leaders calling for an end to austerity across Europe. Presto! The bond markets did not go berserk. Contrary to wide expectations, instead of punishing Italy investors remained calm and did not proceed to increase its borrowing costs. And voila, the euro crisis has come to an end.
News also spread like wildfire this week about the notorious austerity paper scandal. An academic paper by the well regarded economists Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart, which has been used by policymakers far and wide to justify their fiscal retrenchment, has been discredited. Among other high profile examples, EU Vice-President for Economic and Monetary Affairs Olli Rehn gave several prominent speeches in the early stages of the crisis explicitly basing European austerity programs on their work.
The International Criminal Court is often accused of being “political” or “politicized” in its selection of situations and cases. What has become most problematic for the Court’s credibility and impartiality in this regard are the situations and cases that have not been selected, and the criteria and discourse used to justify such omissions and imbalanced prosecutions. Specifically, the “gravity threshold,” which the OTP uses to justify who is prosecuted and who isn’t, is politically problematic for the ICC. Prosecutorial strategies that target only one side of a conflict are frequently justified in terms of gravity – that the crimes of some individuals are graver than their opposing parties,.
I suggest there are two political problems with the gravity threshold in case selection.
1) Assessing the gravity of one party’s or individual’s crimes relative to their opponents is ethically and politically problematic. This approach ultimately results in the ICC's de facto support of one side of the conflict over another and perpetuates impunity gaps at the international and domestic level.
2) While atrocity crimes can be ranked, scaled, and compared across parties and perpetrators, no victim can be considered less victimized or less deserving of justice than another. To date, the manner in which the gravity threshold has been operationalized is an affront to victims and is likely to erode the ICC’s legitimacy among this important constituency.
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- Red lines or red lights on Syria? It's not just about Syria.
- What if the Tsarnaevs had been shooters instead of bombers?
- Playing out academic feuds in the press...Reinhart and Rogoff respond.
- Fodder for PTJ: What do scientifc studies tell us?
- Very persuasive: I spent three hours yesterday on the tarmac at O'Hare delayed by an FAA furlough hold as a result of sequestration -- passed the time reading Mark Blyth's Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea -- scathing rebuke of neoliberalism.
- If you are keeping score, Spain's unemployment just topped 27% -- 6 million -- with more budget cuts pending.
- Tarak Barkawi warns of the neoliberal assault on academia.
- While we're at it -- here's one reason REF is so popular among academics. ht: Sherrill Stroschein
- Who knew? Apparently it's more lucrative to be a member of the Chinese National Peoples Congress than to be a member of the US Congress.
- The best we can advise on whether or not to go to grad school: "good luck?"
- I'm confused -- we spend $750bn+/yr on national security and we're in danger of falling into isolation?
It has been a week or two since we have FNB-ed. After last week's events, we could use some extra silliness:
There is so much criticism of the academic enterprise these days, asserting that professors are too focused on research and not enough on teaching and not enough on relevance to the policy world. These critiques are hardly new, but bear more weight in a time of austerity. It is easy to point to some work that seems hardly relevant and some professors who seem least interested in engaging the “real world,” but I am constantly reminded of the opposite—professors who become deeply engaged in policy-making one way or another.
If last's week Thursday morning linkage was Africa-themed, this week's links are China-related and inevitably harken back to the events in Boston:
- Laurie Garrett, as she is wont to do, wonders if this recent bird flu outbreak in China is "the big one"
- Beijing air is so bad they are canceling recess, kids at grave risk
- Oh, and Shanghai air sucks too
- China's shale gas revolution has yet to begin (Armond Cohen thinks it will take too long to take off)
- Japanese tree die-off blamed on air pollution from China
- New bilateral effort between U.S. and China to address climate change
- Chinese demand for fish bladder for soup
- The difference between pets in Diablo III and Torchlight II.
- Blah blah blah Game of Thrones blah blah credible commitments blah blah blah prisoners' dilemma.
- Taylor Fravel says that China hasn't abandoned no-first use.
- Pavel Podvig demolishes "SDI ended the Cold War" claptrap. Key graf: "The evolution of the Soviet attitudes toward SDI suggests that the main factor that contributed to the ending the confrontation of the Cold War was the willingness of the United States and the Soviet Union to engage in a dialogue on reduction of their nuclear forces. The only result that the SDI program was able to achieve in the context of confrontation was to embolden those in the Soviet Union who defined security in confrontational terms and benefited from this kind of understanding."
And also:
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Note: this is the first in what I hope will be a series of posts opening up issues relating to journal process for general discussion by the international-studies community.
Although many readers already know the relevant information, let me preface this post with some context. I am the incoming lead editor of International Studies Quarterly (ISQ), which is one of the journals in the International Studies Association family of publications. We are planning, with PTJ leading the effort, some interesting steps with respect to online content, social media, and e-journal integration--but those will be the subject of a later post. I have also been rather critical of the peer-review process and of the fact that we don't study it very much in International Relations.
The fact is that ISQ by itself--let alone the collection of ISA journals and the broader community of cognate peer-reviewed publications--is sitting on a great deal of data about the process. Some of this data, such as the categories of submissions, is already in the electronic submission systems--but it isn't terribly standardized. Many journals now collect information about whether a piece includes a female author. Given some indications of subtle, and consequential, gender bias, we have strong incentives to collect this kind of data.
But what, exactly, should we be collecting?
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Good morning... These aren't the linkages you're looking for...
- Owen Jones reviews the hierarchy of death in the wake of the Boston bombing or what Judith Butler, in Frames of War, might call (un)grievable lives.
- Deepak Sarma at Racialicious writes about "Being Brown After the Boston Bomb Blast." (Hey the dudes who did it turned out to be white. Brown and black people can chill now right? right?? Those false early reports about "dark skinned" suspects were just an honest mistake... Yeah, let's move on...)
- Tom Scocca at the Gawker asks, "Is the New York Post Edited by a Bigoted Drunk who Fucks Pigs?" (I dunno... but while we're talking about racism in America...)
- Why does the one with the most melanin always seem to die first in American horror flicks? And if that's the case, why are these movies apparently popular with minority audiences? Joshua Alston at the Feminist Wire explains why the American horror genre typified by Evil Dead is a race-reversed minstrel show.
- Speaking of minstrel shows, has the desi coolie evolved into the nebbish and accentless "American" who fills the minority quota on 'Merican tee-vee? Is "the most successful minority in US history" the beneficiary of pervasive anti-black racism? Have DuBois' fears of Indians' allegiances come true? And is this new found "acceptance" being translated into refashioning US foreign policy? In other words is IACPA becoming the new AIPAC? (Not quite...)
- Spencer Kornhaber trashes Tom Cruise's latest sci-fi flick, Oblivion, for failing to ask any serious moral or ethical questions, particularly about weaponized drone warfare. (By the way, when did the Pakistani tribal belt become our vision of the future?)
- Nobel Prize winner, Muhammed Yunnus, asks why there isn't social fiction to imagine a ways to end poverty. (Isn't that what micro-credit was?)
- Anil Kapoor will be the new Jack Bauer in the Indian version of 24. (Maybe instead of chasing terrorists they could chase a more immediate threat to human security in India: gang and child rapists?)
Our readers may have noticed the lack of Saturday linkage. I was at the MD/PA/WV/VA combined state Tumbling and Trampoline state championships, in a facility with Faraday-cage properties. I am pleased to say that my daughter qualified for National Junior Olympics in her two main events -- trampoline and double-mini trampoline. Along the way she took first place and fourth place, for Maryland, in her age-group and level. Below is video for her Level 6 tramp routine.
Although most Americans' attention was focused on the dramatic apprehension of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, quite a lot of significant events happened around the world. For example:
- China appeared to abandon its no-first use pledge for nuclear weapons.
- China's had trouble getting aid to a remote part of Sichuan provence hit by a major earthquake.
- The EU brokered a game-changing deal between Serbia and Kosovo.
- The US is paying more for its overseas basing network (via LFC).
- And just today, shots have been fired at a marijuana-legalization rally in Denver.
There's also been a lot of interesting commentary and stuff, including:
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Charles King at The Daily Beast:
In other words, the focus now should be on the Tsarnaevs as homegrown terrorists, not on the ethnic or regional origins of their family. Journalists’ initial conversations with family members in Dagestan amplify that point: a sense of shock that two nice boys who had gone to America for their education could have been involved in such a brutal act. Dzhokhar, for example, was reportedly a successful student and championship wrestler in Cambridge, Massachusetts—hardly the typical foreign jihadist. People with family roots in the Caucasus are often perceived in Russia and elsewhere as inherently rebellious and conflict-prone, a line of thinking that has deep roots in Russian culture. That imagery still affects how street crime is reported in Moscow, how Russian security services target people they believe to be potential terrorists, and how Russia’s own often brutal “anti-terrorist operations” play out in the towns and villages of places such as Dagestan, Kabardino-Balkaria, North Ossetia, and other republics of the north Caucasus that are little known in the West. The sad truth is that the scenes in Boston early this morning—with SWAT teams in full battle gear, a shootout on the street, and an alleged suspect perhaps wearing an explosive vest or other suicide device—are all too typical in the north Caucasus itself. The difference is that in Russia, these operations are sometimes little more than assassination missions, designed to target alleged terrorists on only the flimsiest of evidence. That is obviously not the case in Boston. But speculating about the brothers’ ethnic origins plays into the worst stereotypes that have bedeviled attempts to bring peace, stability, and good governance to Russia’s southern borderlands.
Boston on lockdown. One suspect dead. One--apparently a CRLS graduate--still at large. The fact is that we still don't have adequate information for much in the way of meaningful speculation. But I do think it useful to call attention to three related issues:
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On this awful news week, I'm feeling like some Thursday Morning Linkage needs a little opening joy before launching into the useful reads of the week:
Here are some useful Africa-centric readings on this awful, awful news week:
- Cullen Hendrix examines the links between food price rises, regime type, and subsidy policies in Africa
- Jennifer Bussell researches why some African governments are more able to prepare for and respond to potential natural disasters
- Jennifer Hazen's new book What Rebels Want drawing from substantial fieldwork in West Africa explains how rebel movements that lose their options for obtaining weapons and other resources may turn to negotiation
- Caitriona Dowd examines the rise of Islamist rebel and milita movements across Africa
- Idean Salehyan and Christopher Linebarger find that elections increase the risk of conflict during civil wars and under authoritarian systems
The Yale H. Ferguson Book Award
The Yale H. Ferguson award, presented by International Studies Association-Northeast, recognizes the book that most advances the vibrancy of international studies as a pluralist discipline. Any book or edited volume published within the field of international studies in the previous calendar year is eligible for consideration. The award winner is selected based on two criteria: (1) that it makes an outstanding contributions to concept-formation, theoretical analysis, or methodological issues in the study of world politics; and (2) that it contributes to the status of international studies as an intellectually pluralist field.
Nominations should be emailed to the committee chair accompanied by a brief letter explaining why a work deserves consideration for the award. Authors may nominate themselves. A copy of each book must be sent to each member of the committee, with the line “Yale H. Ferguson Award, c/o” at the top of each address. Nominations are due by May 15, 2013 and books must be received by May 31, 2013.
Members of the award committee, as well as the current program chair for ISA-NE, are ineligible for the award.
With the increased likelihood that Assad will fall, even were he to hang on until a Gaddafi-style bitter end, pressure is mounting on the U.S., Europe, and Turkey inter alia to come up with a game plan for the post-endgame. The good news is progress is rapidly being made: stepped up aid from the U.S., aid from Europe, intelligence sharing among Turkey-Jordan-US-Europe, and direct training of Syrian opposition forces.
All of this may be enough to tip the balance against the Assad regime, leading to its end sooner rather than later. But it is not nearly enough to handle the widely expected chaos once the endgame is reached. What about playing the Russia card? The greatest fear is that extremist al-Qaeda affiliated groups will get their hands on a variety of weapons caches in the capital and elsewhere, let alone a full-blown civil war that would seriously destabilize the entire region. Special forces from the aforementioned countries will be needed, but they will likely be operating in an incredibly volatile if not thoroughly unstable environment.
Because we don't know enough to engage in anything resembling responsible commentary.
And those things that we can say something worthwhile about--including comparisons with other terrorist attacks past and present, such as what happened on the same day in Iraq; and the socio-political dynamics of the US response so far--don't exactly demand my input.
- Via Marginal Revolution, the always-interesting Xavier Marquez writes about Randall Collins' sociology. [Abandoned Footnotes]
- Obama staffers find jobs in white-shoe Washington. It turns out that the new boss is much the same as the old boss [The New Republic]
- Phil Schrodt talks about GDELT: Global Data on Events, Location, and Tone, a global events database that Jay Ulfelder has called the future of political science. Rolf Friedheim gives a detailed case-study of using the data in R to map some Russian protests.
- Good news for (consumers of) higher education: Marginal Revolution argues that the cost and time savings of online education trump Baumol's cost disease. As one commenter asks: "As the saying goes 'science progresses one funeral at a time' – today less so. But what if one day science progress were slowed by zombie lectures on the ‘net?" [Marginal Revolution]
And also:
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I think my toaster has more computing power than that guidance system…
I think one of the most interesting findings in all of international relations scholarship is that the disproportionate share of conflict in the international system is comprised of a few dyads fighting over and over, what are known as “enduring rivalries.” These are highly emotional conflicts in which countries are found to fight because they have fought before, not because of the presence of some tangible and intractable conflict of interest.
I avoided this work for a long, long time for a number of reasons. First, “rivalries” is a terrible, terrible moniker for what is being described and it made me not take it seriously. Rivalries sounds like Yankees-Red Sox. In reality these are at the very least like Manchester City/Manchester United in which fans actually hurt each other. Second, the enduring rivalries crowd does a really bad job drawing the consequences of their findings for international relations theory, I suspect due to the research tradition’s roots in peace research in which numbers and pushing the research agenda step by step are favored over grand theoretical statements. That is unfortunate because there is an enormous implication here. The international system is not conflict-prone due to anarchy. The international system does not really have a character at all. If it does it is mostly peaceful. Realists draw excessive conclusions from micro-level conflicts that have their own unique origins.
I think readers will be sad to hear, therefore, that I think I am in enduring rivalry with my next-door neighbors. Or if they do rational choice work or study Africa, perhaps they will be happy. Either way, let me explain.
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