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12 Aug 2014
by Laura Sjoberg
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RIP Robin Williams – A Feminist Memory

The news that Robin Williams died today hit me hard – I’ve always had a soft spot for him. I first heard his stand-up comedy in the late 90s when I was dubbing tapes to CDs for my father – he had Robin Williams’ “Night at the Met” (1984) on tape, and I listened to the whole thing. I’ve long agreed with the assessment that the troubled comedian was the “funniest man alive” – and I’ve been a collector of his comedy and his movies for quite a while. I was shocked hearing of his death, both because Williams’ comedy seemed immortal, and because one is never prepared for that sort of suddenness.

Reading the news articles around Williams’ death, I remembered a part of the show that he did at the Met in 1984 that has been particularly relevant to my research career, and thought it might honor his memory to post about it.

“That’s why there should be a woman president. There would never be any wars. Never, never. You know this. Its the truth. There would never be a war. Just every 28 days there would be severe negotiations. You know that. Yes.”

On the one hand, the gender essentialist logic couldn’t be more wrong. On the other hand, he was talking about gender and politics, and doing it thirty years ago. This passage always made me chuckle – and made for some great essay questions on Gender and Politics finals. Farewell, Mr. Williams/Mork/Ms. Doubtfire.

30 Jul 2014
by Laura Sjoberg
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The Incredible Silliness of Being Against Feminisms

When I was in high school, I drove a car that was absolutely covered in bumper stickers – gems like “I still miss my ex, but my aim is improving.” Many of them, I would not be caught with now – but one, I still remember. It said “feminism is the radical notion that women are people too.” Since the bumper sticker is still for sale twenty years later, it is fair to say that the interpretation that was on the back of my car has had some staying power.

That’s why I am curious about the rise of being “against” feminism. While I’ve known for a long time that some people were uncomfortable using the word, and that many people (even among feminists) disagree on the appropriate political content and mission of feminism, the “Women Against Feminism” movement has me confused – are there women who disagree with the notion that women are people too? I’m not the first to have commented on the issue – Jessica Valenti wrote a great piece for The Guardian with perspective, and the conclusion that feminists should let antifeminists stop them. Reading all of the discussion of “women against feminism,” though, I remained confused about the very premise – especially in a world where headlines everyday suggest women aren’t being treated as human. Just today, women shouldn’t laugh in public, some guy was arrested for using his cell phone to look up women’s skirts (really), a seven-year-old girl was raped in a Bangalore school, and accounts of astonishing violence against women are way too frequent (see this story about ISIS in Iraq, e.g.). I’m not comparing any of these incidents – just suggesting that there are myriad ways everyday that women aren’t treated as full humans. And I can’t figure out why there would be women opposed to the recognition that women are people too.

So I investigated further, and figured out that the “Women Against Feminism” tumblr and Facebook page list a lot of great reasons to be “against feminism.” Here are some highlights (my commentary in italics):

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23 Jul 2014
by Laura Sjoberg
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The Hard Way #10: Know Your Own Style

A bunch of my Facebook friends over the last couple of days have reposted an article by Gregory Semenza, on the value of writing for ten minutes each day. I think that’s great advice for some people, but I also think that one’s maximum productivity is about knowing one’s strengths – and one’s limitations. While I’ve never thought of myself as particularly productive (or particularly unproductive), enough people have suggested that I am particularly productive that I thought that maybe I should weigh in on how that came to be – especially since the ‘writing for ten minutes each day’ thing – especially at the start of a project, where I really need some time to be able to think about what it is going to look like.

I do think that its universal that being goal-oriented is important to productivity, but I think it is important to listen to yourself and your strengths and weaknesses to figure out how to best do that. For me, people often suggest that I ‘don’t sleep’ to get the sort of productivity that I have. Actually, I sleep eight hours most nights, and find myself grumpy and unhappy when I don’t get the opportunity. In fact, I find desiring to sleep one of my most effective work-incentivization tools.

So if I don’t write ten minutes every day, what do I do to keep up with work? Here’s some stuff that works for me, though it may not work for you:

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19 Jul 2014
by Laura Sjoberg
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Is Russia Losing Control over the Ukrainian Separatists?

This is a guest post by Milos Popovic, a PhD student at the International Relations and European Studies Department at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary.

A recent post by a Russian-backed separatist leader Igor Girkin claiming credit for shooting down the Malaysian airline MH17 had circulated the Internet before it was removed. The separatists now deny their involvement arguing that they don’t have the capabilities to shoot down a plane at 10,000 meters (reportedly, the altitude of MH17). The evidence suggests that the plane was hit by the surface-to-air BUK missile system, which can launch missiles up to an altitude of 22,000 meters. Both the Russian and Ukrainian military have this hardware, but the two countries adamantly reject their involvement. Allegedly, a group of AP journalists have encountered a launcher similar to the BUK system near the town of Snizhne, which is under the rebel control. While Russia doesn’t deny its military support to the separatists, it denies the delivery of the BUK to its client. If it turns out that the Ukrainian rebels carried out the attack against Moscow’s directions, it will be a major source of embarrassment for Russia, their main supporter.

However, it won’t be the first time that a proxy embarrassed its sponsor. For instance, the Palestinian leftist groups have abducted foreign tourists in the late 1960s against the interests of their Arab sponsors. The Abu Nidal Organization embarrassed Syria when it claimed the responsibility for IRA’s assassination attempt against the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. During the Yugoslav wars, the Bosnian Serb leadership outraged their sponsor, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, when they refused to accept the Vance-Owen Plan. In Sri Lanka, the Tamil Tigers first refused a peace agreement brokered by their sponsor India, and then turn their guns against the Indian peacekeeping corps.

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15 Jul 2014
by Laura Sjoberg
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How To Write a Successful Academic Book (Tips from an Academic Editor)

This is a post by Erin Jenne, from Central European University. A security problem at RelationsInternational forced us to close accounts, so the author byline here is incorrect. Sorry for the inconvenience!

As with the publishing world in general, today’s academic presses—hardly ever known for profitability—have had to adapt to a series of hardships. For many years now (a process accelerated by the recent economic crisis), libraries have been pushed to cut back on their book acquisitions (a central profit center for academic presses), and these days allocate ever more of their budgets to serials, databases, and other electronic resources at the expense of book monographs. Meanwhile, due to university-wide budget cuts, university presses have had to live with reduced subsidies.

As a result, academic presses are increasingly pressured to base their decisions on “what sells” in the publishing world. They are thus “faced with the choice of publishing fewer books or of changing the mix of books they do publish by reducing the number of specialized monographs in favor of books with a larger potential market—broad syntheses, biographies of well-known figures, anthologies, books with a potential for undergraduate course adoptions, even textbooks.”

Ironically, the pressure to publish books to attract a mass audience runs directly counter to academic trends toward increased research specialization. There was some hope that electronic publishing might provide an outlet for niche academic research, but for now, prospective authors should be aware of what they are up against. First time authors hoping to publish their dissertations as books are often the first casualty (I gave lots of tips on this subject in a prior post), as presses must be confident that their titles will sell at least 200-700 copies to be assured of breaking even. This means that books must be shorter (thus cheaper to print), and they must sell.

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14 Jul 2014
by R. William Ayres
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Waves of War and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Like my good friend Steve Saideman, I don’t write much about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This is academically odd, given that most of my stuff has been on ethnic conflict, secessionism, and irredentism, and the whole Israel/Palestine thing falls smack in the middle of that category. It was certainly included in the data set I compiled for my dissertation, but I’ve largely avoided it since then for reasons well-known to most people in the international relations field. Israel-Palestine is the ultimate Third Rail – a viper’s nest of highly-charged, overly-emotional, moralistic arguments that are deadlocked into an endless shouting match. In that arena there is no winning, and rarely even surviving. From a rational choice perspective, staying away from this argument is a pretty obvious choice – the costs FAR outweigh the benefits.

So why am I stepping into it now? Because I wrote a review last week of Andreas Wimmer’s latest book, Waves of War: Nationalism, State Formation, and Ethnic Exclusion in the Modern World. And even though Wimmer manages to write the entire book without mentioning Israel or Palestine even once, I think the picture he puts together may hold not the solution to the problem, but the answer to why there is endless fighting and no progress towards peace.

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14 Jul 2014
by Laura Sjoberg
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Stopping Wartime Sexual Violence?

This post is cross-posted at the Polity Blog, in promotion of my recently published Gender, War, and Conflict (Polity Press, 2014).

It was a coincidence that Gender, War, and Conflict was formally published on the eve of the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence, held in London. The Global Summit, as its webpage described, was meant to shatter the culture of impunity towards wartime rape, take practical steps toward decreasing it, provide support to survivors, and change attitudes of apathy.

This ambitious summit was attended by public figures like Hilary Rodham Clinton and Angelina Jolie, as well as by scholars of wartime sexual violence like my colleagues Amelia Hoover Green and Marsha Henry, among others. While I sat this one out at home in Florida, I followed its progress on Twitter and read news coverage as the summit looked to “write the last chapter in the history of wartime rape.”

Scholars writing from the Summit expressed a combination of hope – given the amount of high-profile political capital being devoted to the cause – and despair – given the long, complicated, and important history of social science research into wartime sexual violence that was largely ignored at the Summit. The biggest complaint I have seen and read is that the Summit’s policy-world and advocate speakers have a commitment to the social cause of ending wartime rape without a matching commitment to knowing and understanding the history of wartime rape, the conditions of possibility of the crime, the significations of rape in conflict, and the gendered contexts in which wartime rape is committed.

In other words, the advocates at the Summit understood that war rape is a terrible crime in which women are disproportionately victimized. But there is more to it, and scholars have been trying to communicate that in order to improve policy analysis, and, hopefully, policy solutions. While the summit is over and the media has moved on to its next target, I think that this point is still a very important one. Continue Reading →

10 Jul 2014
by Brandon Valeriano
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Being a Minority Professor in Modern America: How Do You Check Privilege When There is None?

For many, being a Professor (Lecturer in the UK) is a badge of honor. It is a source of pride that demonstrates intelligence plus hard work. For others, it can actually be a source of stress and, in the extreme, a weakness that leads to violence.

The Ersula Ore tale has made its way through the media in the last few weeks. She was stopped for jaywalking while people in front of her were not stopped. Her response to this was to be offended and stating that she was an ASU Professor, then being manhandled and brutalized on the ground are inexcusable for this situation. She clearly made an error, that error being to think that there is some sort of privilege that comes from being a Professor in modern America.

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9 Jul 2014
by Laura Sjoberg
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Academic Careerism and Poker Strategy: WSOP Edition

One of my good friends from college, Andrew Brokos, is a professional poker player and poker coach (as Foucault82, follow him at @thinkingpoker on Twitter). He is playing this week in the World Series of Poker Main Event in Las Vegas right now, as he has done for a number of years now. Andrew and I had conversations about playing poker back when we worked together in Boston. Those conversations concluded (as I am sure many of my IR friends can attest) that I suck at poker unless I get to stack the deck. And you don’t get to do that in real poker. Thus I suck at poker. But I have enjoyed following his blog over the years – not least because its a great answer to the question of what you can do with a University of Chicago philosophy degree.

This week, I have been reading about Andrew’s early progress in the Main Event (he’s one of the most consistent finishers in this event over the last decade), and about professional development questions in International Relations (including a discussion with Dan Nexon on Facebook about a future post on the ISQ editors’ blog, Steve Saideman’s post on overthinking professional strategy, and Erin Jenne’s useful post on RelationsInternational on book publishing strategies for recent Ph.D.s. Reading them together, I wondered if I (and other IR academics) might benefit from using some of Andrew’s poker strategy tips to find balance in professional development.

Andrew’s coaching tips often focus around thinking about the situation you’re in, using game theory to assess your odds, and making the right play at the right time – but even Andrew has criticized overthinking. His analytical approach to poker and mine to academic careers have a lot in common – so I figured I’d play with the idea of academic careerism and poker strategy in honor of Andrew’s WSOP appearance this week. Caveat: of course, I know there’s more tournament poker and academic strategy lack in commonality than that they share. But I think that some comparison is sure to be fun, and might be helpful. So … here’s my poker-scholarship advice of the day: play the situation and the cards, but don’t overplay either. Below, I try to use humor and some of Andrew’s advice to make that case.

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8 Jul 2014
by Laura Sjoberg
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Norms of Sovereignty, Part 3: China

China, like a large majority of the world’s states but unlike the United States, has ratified the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (henceforth UNCLOS). This means that China has signed up for a set of fairly specific rules about what states can claim as both territorial waters and exclusive economic zones (EEZs). Furthermore, there is an arbitration system attached to these rules. At the same time, China has for decades made some pretty ambitious territorial claims, that put it in conflict with the claims of a variety of its neighbours, including (but not limited to) Vietnam, the Philippines, and Japan. Many of these claims are simply unsupportable under UNCLOS rules. When international law comes up against Chinese maritime ambitions, norms of international dispute resolution may well suffer.

China has made these claims for decades, but has begun making them significantly more aggressively in the past couple of years, as indicated by an increasing willingness to play chicken with Japan over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands, an increase in construction projects on features in the Spratley chain claimed by the Philippines, and the dispatch of a drilling ship with heavy naval escort into waters claimed by Vietnam. While China pursues its claims through physical force, it is likely that sooner or later, probably sooner, one or other of these disputes will get to an UNCLOS tribunal. And many of the disputes (although not the one with Japan) are based on the “nine-dash line,” a map with nine dashes showing almost the entirety of the South China Sea as part of China. This map is imprecise, the sorts of claims China is making based on it are unclear, and its historical provenance gives it no standing in international law. An UNCLOS tribunal, in other words, is not likely to find it compelling.

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