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.
Pedagogy
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
How Legislator Professionalization Constrains Executive Decree Issuance in Latin America
This is a guest post by Alissandra T. Stoyan (Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Kansas State University) and Sarah Shair-Rosenfield (Assistant Professor, School of Politics and Global Studies, Arizona State University). This post is based on their article, “Constraining Executive Action: The Role of Legislator Professionalization in Latin America,” forthcoming at Governance and now … Read more
So You’re on the Job Market, Part III: Coping (Repost)
This is an edited version of a post that appeared previously, and is the final installment of a three-part series on the academic job market. As always, helpful comments and suggestions are welcome. In two previous posts (see here and here) I’ve discussed some issues related to being on the political science job market. In … Read more
So You’re on the Job Market, Part II: Expectations (Repost-ish)
Note: This is essentially a reposting of an earlier post from 2014. I have made a few minor tweaks to the original, but it’s more or less the same post. Anyone with different backgrounds or experience is welcome to share their advice in the comments section (provided it’s constructive). In a previous post I outlined … Read more
So You’re on the Job Market, Part I: Preparation (Repost)
Editor’s Note: This is a reposting of a post I wrote up a couple of years ago. Given that we’re at the beginning of April, it seemed like it would be useful to rebroadcast potentially useful information for folks starting to think about the market in the fall. This is the first of three posts … Read more
Mapping subnational administrative areas
Between teaching classes and a couple of projects that I’ve been working on lately, I’ve been finding Stata’s spmap command to be a really useful tool for generating maps to display data. One project in particular has involved the collection of some new data for examining various developmental outcomes at the subnational level. To some extent … Read more
This is not the PhD advice you were Looking for, either
Some recent attention has focused on the difficulty of getting a tenure-track position in Political Science and thus the desirability of enrolling in a Ph. D. program in the first place. Dan Drezner in blog posts here and here has done an excellent job chronicling the long odds of getting a tenure-track job after earning … Read more
The Prisoner’s Dilemma in Introductory International Relations
This semester marks my seventh time teaching the introductory course to international relations and my seventh time incorporating strategic games into the course. A staple game for any political science course is the Prisoner’s Dilemma and a typical introduction of the material to students may have students explain the concept or, perhaps, play it with a … Read more
Military Deployments, Human Development, and Growth
The deployment of US military forces has received a bump in attention over the past year or two. Most recently, as Michael Allen has discussed, US military forces were deployed to Poland in response to the deteriorating situation in Ukraine. In 2011 President Obama sent 100 US military personnel to Uganda to help track Joseph … Read more