International Relations

My Backwoods Upbringing Serves Me Well

by

I found this article while glancing at Thomas Ricks' blog at FP–It's about the issues that US troops have been facing in Afghanistan with the weapons they're assigned.  I've commented on similar micro-level issues before and I think this AP article is pretty closely related, although it focuses more on the US side.  I really think framing the issue in the way that the AP does undercuts our ability to
understand what the problem is. 

Read more

The War We Don’t See

by

This is a topic that I’ll probably expand on later, but I was just reading an article discussing the role of Hamid Karzai’s brother in the present Afghan conflict.  This article gets at an issue that I’ve thought about before.  From the FP article cited above: But he could not exist without the support of coalition … Read more

Lessons From the Past? Or Justifying an Idiosyncratic Research Agenda?

by

I remember reading Michael Tomz's book Reputation and International Cooperation: Sovereign Debt Across Three Centuries for a seminar a couple of years ago, and someone having made a remark about how Tomz was probably just really interested in the time period or the subject matter, but had to frame the research in such a way as to justify its relevance beyond what might be the author's more narrow interests.  Since then I've had a few discussions with some of my advisers on the topic of how we frame our research–essentially how we sell a line of research as relevant to our field.  Overall though, I've found that this is a topic that seems to have stayed out of in-class discussions for the most part.

Read more

Economy of Force and Asymmetric Conflicts

by

Joshua Keating at Foreign Policy had a piece posted a couple of days ago that just caught my eye.  It basically talks about the current status of terrorist training camps and what the itinerary for the typical attendee entails.  It's pretty brief, but I think it covers some interesting subject matter.  And let me preface … Read more

Best Practice in Political Science (or Any Field)

by

Over the past year or so I've been getting more and more into network analysis–Both for its theoretical and methodological components.  For the most part, this methodological approach has not seen widespread use in political science, although network approaches are steadily growing.  Emilie Hafner-Burton, Miles Kahler, and Alexander Montgomery have a relatively recent article about … Read more

Bargaining with Your Right Brain

by

A friend outside of political science linked me this post asking if we deal with bargaining models in political science.  For those of you who are not in the know, one of the mainstays of contemporary International Relations game theory treats war as a bargaining process between states.  As such, the author argues that traditional … Read more

Trade Diversion is up for an award, needs your vote.

by

Jonathan Dingel (www.tradediversion.net) is up for a substantial scholarship for blogging and, apparently, is the only economics-based blog up for the scholarship.  Given that there are also no other quantitative political science or formal theory blogs available (there are plenty of normative politics blogs, though) and his posts are actually useful academically, I encourage you … Read more

The European Treasury

by

Philip Coggan gave an interesting interview this morning to NPR in which he discussed the effect of the of the United States’ bailout failure on the European markets.  The primary purpose of the short interview was to describe the European perspective on the global impact of the U.S.’s financial crisis and the speculation on Congress’s activity surrounding it, though one incidental point caught my attention. 

Coggan mentions that a concern in Europe at the moment is that a large Swiss bank might fail.  This would be quite problematic because, while these types of firms are probably considered "too big to fail" for the European economy, the Swiss government could not afford to bail them out.  Europe has a strong interest in the survival and growth of European financial markets–whether they are located within an EU constituent state or not.  However, the EU does not have a treasury of its own, so it doesn’t have the power to spend taxpayers’ money on economic bailouts–it doesn’t even really taxpayers in the strictest sense.

Read more