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It’s the last weekend in August, which means at least 1 of 2 things are happening: APSA drinking ABDs hurriedly working on their job market materials. Since (a) is still a week away, I thought I’d take a second to offer some unsolicited advice on (b): job market materials. By job market materials, I’m referring to the CV, cover letter, writing sample, teaching portfolio, research statement, transcripts, and letters of recommendation that will make up the totality of what any academic hiring committee will know about you and your work. It’s basically your academic life, condensed into someth
As the summer movie season ends, it makes sense to bring back Friday Nerd Blogging after spending most Fridays at the theatre. This week’s invokes all kinds of IR, including resource conflicts, gender dynamics, and Tom Hardy: Share
The following is a guest post by Jeff Colgan, Richard Holbrooke Assistant Professor at Brown University, and is @JeffDColgan on Twitter. It’s that time of year again, when professors are designing syllabi as fast as they can with deliberation and care. Recently I analyzed IR syllabi for PhD students. The data suggest a gender bias that instructors could easily correct. The case that gender diversity is good for IR and political science has been made elsewhere, repeatedly and persuasively. According to APSA, women are 42 percent of graduate students in political science (in the US), but only 24
AUG 27
APSA Tweet Up: Ducks Like Beer
Once again, those poli sci types on twitter (Marc Lynch, Dan Drezner, me, and the other usual suspects) will be meeting up at the APSA on Friday, August 4th from 5:30-7pm at the Parc 55 hotel bar (which I believe is on the second floor) which is across the street from the Hilton. Note that the regular Hilton is undergoing renovation so the usual bar/lobby meeting arrangements will not work this t
AUG 21
#BringBackOurGirls, Feminist Solidarity & Intervention – Part Two
My first post on the Duck focused on the emergence of the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag and campaign, pointing also to the ease with which hashtags can get appropriated and campaigns derailed. Yesterday, #BringBackOurGirls Nigeria (@BBOG_Nigeria on twitter) started a one week campaign to mark 500 days since the abduction. Given the continuation of the campaign, in today’s post I want to dig a bit dee
AUG 19
So You Would Like a Job at a Policy School
So, in another installment on the job market front, I thought I’d weigh in with some thoughts on possible differences of job postings and hiring processes at policy schools. Admittedly, this is an idiosyncratic take having just worked at one of them, but I think there may be some generalizable aspects from my own experience. I have also passed through two others as a post-doc. If my institution i
AUG 18
The Future of Deterrence?
A long, long time ago, before I became a professor and even before I went to graduate school for my doctorate, I worked for a few years in the defense community. I was a Defense Analyst for the Strategic Assessment Center of Science Applications International Corporation (unfortunately, the SAC no longer exists), which was a small organization that dealt with issues of future war. We did much of o
Challenges to Academic Freedom Above the Wall
Why Worry About Online Media and Academic Freedom? Um, because academic administrations have lousy instincts? I have gotten involved in this whole online media intersecting with academic freedom mostly by accident–the ISA mess last year. I am not an expert on academic freedom, nor am I an expert on the use of online media. So, I could imagine a university representative being upset at me as an
AUG 17
Opting for Trials Post-Conflict? Why the Structure of Losers Matters
This post was written with Lindsay Heger, who is Associate Director, One Earth Future Foundation. We’ve seen the rise of judicial means to bring human rights violators to trial in recent decades, both regionally and globally. Most famously, the International Criminal Court, was established after the Rome Treaty was ratified in 2002 in order to bring the most egregious state violators of human righ
Living IR: Lessons from Manuela Picq’s arrest and detention
Photo of Manuela Picq being arrested. Photo used with permission. Over the weekend news came from Ecuador that Dr Manuela Picq of Universidad San Francisco de Quito, had been beaten and arrested while participating in a legal protest over indigenous rights as a journalist. Initially hospitalised as a result of injuries sustained at the hands of police, she was informed that her visa had been canc
AUG 14
Convincing Waverers to Support the Iran Deal
When the Iran Deal was announced and supported by the P5 of the UN Security Council, I would have thought that the tide of elite opinion among US lawmakers would break in support of the Deal, possibly including some Republicans (maybe Jeff Flake?), possibly enough to filibuster a no vote in the Senate. Now, it comes down to whether President Obama has the votes in either the House or Senate to fo
AUG 13
One Size Fits Few
With all of the recent essays on the Duck this summer about the job market, citation indexes, and lack of confidence, there seems to be a brewing undercurrent about the anxiety of another academic year. Some of us maybe facing down a PhD defense and the job market for the first time, some of us compiling our pre-tenure review files, and some of us just generally feeling uneasy about a new area of
AUG 12
Affective or Effective? War Child’s Gamefication of Conflict Experience
Gamification is “is the application of game elements and digital game design techniques to non-game problems, such as business and social impact challenges”, to borrow the course description from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania’s Gamification MOOC. The approach has been used to try and improve employee productivity, facilitate risk prevention education (and indeed many other f
The collateral damage of performance metrics
This is a guest post from Daniel Mügge who is an associate professor of political science at the University of Amsterdam and the lead editor of the Review of International Political Economy. In two recent posts, Cullen Hendrix, and Daniel Nexon and Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, have tabled important pros and cons of Google Scholar (GS) as a base for measuring of academic performance. And the flurry of
AUG 10
Academia isn’t Baseball
PTJ’s Essential Player Statistics This is a guest post by both Nexon and Patrick Thaddeus Jackson. Standard disclaimers apply. Cullen Hendrix’s guest post is a must read for anyone interested in citation metrics and international-relations scholarship. Among other things, Hendrix provides critical benchmark data for those interested in assessing performance using Google Scholar. We love the post,
Debating Covert Intervention and the Democratic Peace
One reason that Patrick I stepped down as a permanent contributors to the Duck of Minerva was to develop ISQ Online as a forum for intellectual exchange surrounding International Studies Quarterly pieces. I think readers of the Duck will find the exchanges there interesting, and so I’ll be using (abusing?) my ‘standing guest’ privileges to call attention to them. ISQ recently published—on early v
Policymaking Gone Global: Learning to Work with NGOs
Policy schools prepare students to work in the public policy realm, most often training students for positions in government. But policymaking is an increasingly diverse field, policy issues span the globe and multiple–state and non-state–actors take part in decision-making and policy implementation. How should we teach global policy-making in policy schools? In a recent article co-authored with C
AUG 07
Foreign Policy and the First GOP Debate
So, with the conclusion of last night’s first GOP debate, it’s worth a look back at the foreign policy claims made by the candidates for the Republican nomination for president. The focus was, as much of the election race will be, focused on domestic policy, but there’s still some stuff worth analyzing. I’ll be working off of the debate transcript posted by Time. The first foreign policy questio
AUG 06
Google Scholar Metrics and Scholarly Productivity in International Relations
The following is a guest post by Cullen Hendrix of the University of Denver. If you’ve read or seen Moneyball, the following anecdote will be familiar to you: Baseball is a complex sport requiring a diverse, often hard-to-quantify[1] skillset. Before the 2000s, baseball talent scouts relied heavily on a variety of heuristics marked by varying degrees of sanity: whether the player had a toned phy
Open Foreign Policy Thread Tonight on GOP Debate
I will be live-tweeting the foreign policy dimensions of the GOP debate tonight here. Readers may want to chime in here on this open thread with the pre-, during, and post-debate reactions. It may be the silly season in the GOP primary, but with the Iran deal pending before Congress, these are consequential times. Yesterday, I live tweeted President Obama’s address on Iran and will be synthesizing
AUG 05
The Duck-Cat of Minerva
I want readers to know that I would never, ever link to a Buzzfeed video. Unless, of course, the video included footage of Ifrit. He receives about three seconds of fame — starting at about a minute in. Share
Gearing Yourself Up For the Academic Job Market: Before You Go on the Market
In our last installment, I indicated that this edition of Gearing Yourself Up would include a discussion of how to put together your job market packet. I think I jumped-the-gun a bit, however. Before putting together your packet, before trying to log on to APSA and navigate eJobs, before telling your family/friends that you are looking for jobs in academia[1], you need to do one crucial thing:
What’s an expert?
Yesterday’s post Confidence and Gender in International Relations got me thinking. The post draws on the excellent survey data from the Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) project at William and Mary’s Institute for the Theory & Practice of International Relations and notes that in the snap polls conducted by the project over the last year, women international relations scholar
AUG 04
Confidence and Gender in International Relations
The following is a guest post by Rachel Merriman-Goldring, Susan Nelson, Hannah S. Petrie at William and Mary’s Institute for the Theory & Practice of International Relations. For decades, survey research has suggested that women lack confidence in their answers, responding ‘don’t know’ or ‘maybe’ at significantly higher rates than their male counterparts. Initially, this trend on political su
AUG 02
Understanding the Emotional Impacts of Ebola: moving beyond crisis and stats to stories
This is a guest post by Dehunge Shiaka, researcher and gender expert in Freetown Sierra Leone What are the emotional and psycho-social impacts of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa? With much of the media attention on the medical, international, and civil-military response to Ebola, this is a question that has largely been unaddressed. Yet it is inevitable that a virus that ravaged communities, hal
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