So it's been a little while since I've posted here (very busy times these are). Anyway, I wanted to link to this post by Phil Arena over at his blog. Phil discusses how his views on various topics related to IR have changed over the past few years. I agree with a lot of what he has to say on these issues–I think a lot of what IR scholars focus on, to the extent that we're interested in the domestic forces generating foreign policy outcomes, tend to place too much stock in the qualities we typically assume to characterize democracies and autocracies. I also agree that economic forces play a huge role in shaping the incentives of political actors–particularly the elites that Arena mentions.
Maps Maps Maps
Back in December I had a brief post about CRACK, a mapmaking software package for Macs. The downside was that CRACK only worked for making maps of the United States. As the need has arisen, Michael Allen and I began looking for something similar that could handle world maps. This brings me to OpenHeatMap, an … Read more