Author: pstaniland

Last week, Aidan Milliff and I summarized recent research we’ve done on Indian public opinion toward China in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog:

“What do Indians think? Public opinion will probably factor into how India’s government responds to these tensions. Our new research analyzes 60 years of data on Indian public opinion about China. The patterns we identify in Indian citizens’ views of China provide insights into the possible foreign policy constraints the Modi government may face.”

This is a film shot (Tri-X, Canon A-1) sometime very early in the pandemic with the kids home all the time:

ASPI has an extremely useful new publication explaining the context for the most recent round of India-China tensions along their (disputed) border. The satellite imagery and mapping are extraordinarily valuable and I suspect a lot of journalists, thinktankers, and academics will be zooming in and out on these maps repeatedly if/as the situation develops.

Mark Haas is a leading scholar of ideology and international alliances, and he has a provocative new article in The Washington Quarterly on how regime ideologies will shape alliance patterns in the Indo-Pacific. It’s currently an ungated PDF and well worth a read:

(I took this photo while lying on my back on the floor of Robertson Hall, the site of Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs; luckily I wasn’t asked to leave for uncouth behavior)

Most years I teach PLSC 36100: Civil War to graduate students; this year is no different. It’s become totally impossible to “represent” the field given the extraordinary amount, and heterogeneity, of civil war research, so the syllabus is increasingly a curated jumping-off point for students’ own research projects. I dumped hundreds of recommended readings into this document back in 2019, which maybe someday I will update; it gives a broader view of the field.

My syllabus certainly has its biases and limits, but hopefully at least gives a meaningful taste of almost every major research approach in the field (it’s weak on formal theory, I know, but there are dozens of excellent formal theorists on my campus to whom I’m happy to point students). Here’s the draft syllabus for Winter 2023; it’s also interesting to see what has and hasn’t changed compared to the first version I taught back in 2010.