Your humble blogger will be posting lightly over the next few days, as he is taking the Official Blog Wife and Official Blog Children to a sunny and warm (but undisclosed) locale.
Before I go, however, some brief reflections on the International Studies Association meetings, which, like Stephen Walt, I did attend:
- I think ISA needs to set aside maybe five prime-time panel slots and not book them until a month before the conference. Between the deadline for submissions and the conference, a s**tload of Very Big Events have taken place, and yet there were too few panels devoted to the financial crisis, Russia-Georgia, etc. Shortening the lag time might help a bit on this front.
- I was a discussant for a terrific panel on whether the spread of mobile phones is increasing the ability of civil society to protest against authoritarian governments. The provisional answer is, "not really," but the spread of these technologies might lead to improved human rights performances by those same governments.
- How the economic crisis affects my field -- a lot more people were asking me, with a twinge of desperation in their voices, whether Fletcher was hiring.
- Joseph Nye was touched to find out that his peers believed him to be the most influential American IR theorist in terms of affecting policy. He nevertheless displayed some genuine humility in suggesting that this assessment was bunk.
- There was something bizarre about having the main conference hotel be in Times Square. If ISA is going to go there, why not hold the conference in my dream locale?
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