Publish or Perish: A Text Adventure of Academic Survival
An interactive text adventure exploring academic publishing pressures, showing how AI tools like Claude Code can extend social science research.
Academic
Civilian Victimization and Rebel Territorial Control in Sierra Leone
New research on civilian victimization and rebel territorial control in Sierra Leone’s civil war, examining variation in atrocities across conflict zones.
Outside the Wire: U.S. Military Deployments and Public Opinion in Host States
New research on how US overseas military deployments affect public opinion in host states, drawing on cross-national survey data.
Updating my civil war and terrorism syllabus
Syllabus update for a graduate course on civil war and terrorism, featuring new readings on rebel governance, civilian targeting, and counterterrorism.
The “academics don’t have real world experience!” argument is really, really, dumb
A direct rebuttal of the claim that academics lack real-world experience—examining what political science research actually contributes to policy.
Graduate student, nominate thyself
This is a quick post that was inspired by some thinking I was doing yesterday while finishing up a project and a resulting tweet that seemed to garner a bit of attention (relative standards here, people). You can find it below. The punch line is this: You should probably nominate your own work for awards, … Read more
Natural (base) selection: The potential costs of a U.S. military base in the Galapagos
Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Charmaine Willis, Andrew Stravers, and Carla Martinez Machain. Environmental activists were shocked to learn over the summer that the U.S. military will soon be deploying counternarcotics forces to an airfield on the island of San Cristóbal, in the Galápagos Islands of Ecuador. The Galápagos, known for inspiring Darwin’s … Read more
Politics and Peer Review in AMLO’s Mexico
Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Alissandra Stoyan and Carla Martinez Machain. They are, respectively, an assistant and an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Kansas State University. On February 21st, Mexico’s Fondo de Cultura Económica (a not-for-profit publisher partially funded by the Mexican Government that is often referred to as … Read more
The strategic use of restraint in internet arguments
Sometimes, I like to argue. I spent eight years engaged in competitive debate in high school and college and the activity prepared me for scholarly research in ways that my classes in both of those settings could not. Early on, in the early frontier days of the internet in the 1990s and early 2000s, it … Read more
On H.R. McMaster’s Tenure as National Security Adviser
Last week President Trump tweeted that his National Security Adviser, Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, would be leaving the administration and would be replaced by John Bolton. McMaster is Trump’s second National Security Adviser since taking office, replacing former Lieutenant General Michael Flynn after the latter’s departure. As I noted in a previous post on Rex … Read more