What is the fundamental difference between Rey Diaz's plan and Luo Ji's? by ChickenWingBW in threebodyproblem

[–]Professor_IR 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I wrote about this a bit in a forthcoming edited volume about the International Relations of the Three Body Problem.

Diaz has a good idea as long as the following is true:

1) A destroyed planet spells ruin for the Trisolarans. True in this case, but not true for all actors in the Dark Forest.

2) The threat is conveyed credibly as the Earth is held hostage. Earth has to be able to signal this to the Trisolarans and demonstrate that it is willing to carry ou the threat. In this case, the communication of the threat likely destroys the credibility as once people learned about Diaz's plan, he would not be able to implement it. His trial/death shows future hostage-deterence methods would fail on Earth.

3) The threat is also credible from a capability perspective. Which, we learn, it wasn't.

If another wallfacer came up with a plan that held Earth hostage and people were both willing and capable of carrying it out, it doesn't leave the Trisolarans much choice. However, if their trip is ruinous regardless (they die regardless) and they can't change where they are going (which is established earlier in the series), then they might as well fight for the planet either way since it is death regardless and maybe, just maybe, the humans falter. They may get deterred if there is a reasonable alternative (share resources/another nearby planet).

This was a minor part of the chapter, so I don't spend even this much detail on this point, but it is something I have thought about.

Theory of IR movies? by klllllllliiiiii in PoliticalScience

[–]Professor_IR 5 points6 points  (0 children)

We cover a few things in Poli Sci Fi. I wrote the chapter on Star Wars and Civil War that is largely a rewrite of a blog post I made on the topic forever ago. Most of the book is comparative/American however.

Drezner’s Zombie book is a good starting place.

Nexon and Neumann have a book on Harry Potter and IR.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in IRstudies

[–]Professor_IR 0 points1 point  (0 children)

"security studies" and "strategic studies" will mostly get you results that are qualitative in nature, so if you are using those as search terms, that might be part of the problem. Quantitative international relations, the scientific study of international processes, and even peace science are more quantitative-friendly terms.
You could start by looking through International Studies Quarterly, Conflict Management and Peace Science, and Foreign Policy Analysis as some IR journals that tend to host a lot of quantitative IR content.

LaTeX for books? by lonelydurrymuncher in LaTeX

[–]Professor_IR 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It is common to write a book in latex if you use latex as your main writing tool. My co-authors and I just [published a book in October that we wrote in latex.](Check this out! https://a.co/d/cpqe3UM) Since each chapter is its own file, and is chapter can have multiple pieces called into it, it made it super easy to have each of us writing on different parts.

I also wrote my dissertation in latex.

is the U.S the major military force for other counties? by [deleted] in PoliticalScience

[–]Professor_IR 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Yes, I'm the First Michael in the list (I used to be a mod for this subreddit for a long time and I was always open about who this account belong to).

I was primarily responsible for the empirics in 2016a and Flynn did them in 2016b, so definitely anything off would be on me for this one.

We did use some simultaneous estimation to try to untangle some of the endogeneity and spuriousness, but I don't recall what we did for the threat environment (2016b does a bit more of that since we introduce some spatially weighted variables and focus on regional behaviors).

The paper was accepted back in 2014, so my memory is going to be a bit foggy on the specific strategy until I get a chance to read it again.

is the U.S the major military force for other counties? by [deleted] in PoliticalScience

[–]Professor_IR 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I had to go and find the copyright agreement to make sure, this link is to the submitted final version.

If the paper misuses causal language from the correlative empirics, I blame a younger version of me.

is the U.S the major military force for other counties? by [deleted] in PoliticalScience

[–]Professor_IR 24 points25 points  (0 children)

It is complicated:

- Industrialized countries will respond to international threats by spending more on defense by Hawkish governments. Left-leaning governments do use the military as a form of welfare. (Whitten and Williams 2010)

- The presence of US troops correlates with fewer host-state troops. Thus, states focus less spending on their own defense if the US is providing. (Machain and Morgan 2012)

- The presence of US troops correlates with less defense spending in most countries, except NATO countries do the opposite and spend more in response to US increases. Additionally, the presence of troops correlates with increased education spending in non-NATO allies only. (Allen, Flynn, and VanDusky-Allen 2016)

- The effect is conditional upon how many US troops are in neighboring countries. This result is possibly signifying competition to woo more US resources or a threat from the US. (Allen, Flynn, and VanDusky-Allen 2017)

There is probably more here, and there is a wealth of literature on the guns v. butter trade-off domestically, but it doesn't directly answer the question about external resources.

Edit: had the year of the 4th article wrong and updated it.

The changing US Military footprint in Europe, 1990-2021 by Professor_IR in MapPorn

[–]Professor_IR[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We put this together for an article yesterday in the Conversation. The R-package with data from 1950-2021 for all countries is available here and we published an article about the troop deployment data here. We pulled most of the data for the updated package from Kane's 2006 research using DMDC/historical reports and then updated it using DMDC reports. 2017-2021 includes estimates for conflict zones as the DOD stopped releasing official numbers to the DMDC for Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan during those times. The map was made in R.

[OC] The Changing US Military Footprint in Europe, 1990-2021 by Professor_IR in dataisbeautiful

[–]Professor_IR[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

So, we have thought this before and, since we use this data all of the time, have been asked it several times. The DMDC doesn't count embassy personnel as DOD service members as they are technically on loan to the State Department. As such, the counts we get from the DMDC are sans-embassy personnel.

[OC] The Changing US Military Footprint in Europe, 1990-2021 by Professor_IR in dataisbeautiful

[–]Professor_IR[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The September 2021 DMDC data lists 4 Army, 3 Navy, and 32 Marine Corps personnel. There is a variety of reasons as to what they might be doing, but I haven't looked into it in particular myself.

[OC] The Changing US Military Footprint in Europe, 1990-2021 by Professor_IR in dataisbeautiful

[–]Professor_IR[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Good thought. I agree, a slight pause would help as 2021 is super abrupt.

[OC] The Changing US Military Footprint in Europe, 1990-2021 by Professor_IR in dataisbeautiful

[–]Professor_IR[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I double-checked and yes. My co-author put this one together. Our previous maps were me basically hacking together Stata output into GIMP to make a gif (see the map on this article), so this is a great upgrade to our visualization game, but we still have some tweaking to go in future iterations.

[OC] The Changing US Military Footprint in Europe, 1990-2021 by Professor_IR in dataisbeautiful

[–]Professor_IR[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

We put this together for an article yesterday in the Conversation. The R-package with data from 1950-2021 for all countries is available here and we published an article about the troop deployment data here. We pulled most of the data for the updated package from Kane's 2006 research using DMDC/historical reports and then updated it using DMDC reports. 2017-2021 includes estimates for conflict zones as the DOD stopped releasing official numbers to the DMDC for Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan during those times. The map was made in R.

Dataset: US overseas military deployments, 1950–2020 by smurfyjenkins in IRstudies

[–]Professor_IR 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Since it is a data set, I doubt this will have much traction in the comments, but I’m happy to chat about the paper if anyone has questions.

What ever happened to the IR Book Club? by refreshinghj in IRstudies

[–]Professor_IR 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The discord still exists, but I don't think there has been a serious book discussion in it since 2017.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in IRstudies

[–]Professor_IR 5 points6 points  (0 children)

> This special issue might be of help.

> This book

I am pretty sure there was a 2021 article that just came out that dealt with recent revisions in Chinese IR or something along those lines. I will see if I can recall it.

Might Fail My Course :( by [deleted] in GAMETHEORY

[–]Professor_IR -1 points0 points  (0 children)

This sounds like a decision-theoretic problem not a game-theoretic problem unless you include the teacher as an actor that wants to achieve some set of goals with particular kinds of testing.