Oleg Shakirov's Blog

Interview with Daniel Nexon

July 5, 2013
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Academic community increasingly uses Internet and particularly blogging platforms to share information, engage in discussions and test ideas. In an interview with the Russian International Affairs Council, Daniel Nexon, Associate Professor in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and founder of the prominent blog on world politics Duck of Minerva, speaks about how this trend develops in International Relations (IR).

 

Interviewer: Oleg Shakirov, postgraduate student at the Diplomatic Academy of the MFA of Russia

 

Interview translated into Russian

 

Professor Nexon, Duck of Minerva was founded as your individual blog but has since been co-authored by many contributors. Why did you choose this model? What challenges have you faced while working with multiple contributors?

 

The Duck of Minerva spent a very short time as an individual blog. I very soon asked two other academics who maintained blogs to come onboard. I’ve always liked group blogs, and it takes some of the pressure off any one person to provide continuous “content churn” (i.e., a steady flow of posts). From there, the blog grew as a collective enterprise and its mission became increasingly collective in character, i.e., to provide an intellectual meeting place for different views on international-relations theory, foreign policy, and academia.

 

The major drawback of having multiple people is that it complicates decision-making. And it requires work to ensure some degree of consistency when it comes to style and formatting.

 

One of the advantages of blogging is that compared to papers in academic journals blog posts generate more feedback in short time. How is this discussion translated into practice (e.g. does it have an impact on policymaking or media coverage)?

 

Most blogs, and certainly The Duck of Minerva, aren’t alternative platforms for academic papers. The typical post is 500-1,000 words. In consequence, they intersect with the production of academic papers in maybe four ways. First, they provide ways of publicizing already-published papers, and hence of getting a wider audience for them or their ideas. Second, they provide a media for working through ideas. A number of my articles and chapters were developed out of blog posts. This does allow for quick feedback. Third, they provide an environment for post-publication review – for debating about published work in the field in a public and inclusive way. Fourth, they provide an outlet for work that is too scholarly to put in a magazine like Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, or The National Interest but too time-sensitive to wait for peer review. Each of these has implications for informing policy – if the right people are reading your blog!

 

Why do you think more and more IR scholars start blogging and engage in discussions online? How does it help in research?

 

The main advantage for research involves expanding your community of interlocutors. Being involved in blogging and Twitter has put me into contact with people—both inside and outside of academia—who are good resources. It also allows for the “bleg” (a mash-up of “blog” and “beg”) in which you might ask your reader for sources of information about a topic. I don’t know why, exactly, blogging has started to take off among IR scholars. Perhaps more people recognize the kinds of benefits I’ve outlined here?

 

For me, one of the most important consequences of blogging has been expanding my awareness of methods, work, and research outside of my immediate competencies. I wrote about this a while back in a short post: But then it occurred to me that maybe this [“low-information voter” theory] is “old news” to me because I spend a fair amount of time in the ‘greater political blogsphere’ (i.e., the milieu of academic, politics, policy, and partisan blogs… as well as the social-media networks they intersect with). One of the virtues of doing so, as I’ve suggested before, is it forces you to read outside of your silo — whether that silo is your research arena, your methodological community, your subfield, or even your discipline.

 

It's widely held that academia is rather conservative in its modus operandi, so how does blogging fit into traditional academic culture? What kind of opposition may an aspiring IR blogger expect to face? Which observable changes has growth of blogosphere already brought to the profession (e.g. publishing, teaching)?

 

This raises a set of issues that are just too extensive to cover here. I’d say that there’s a wide range of reaction to it. Some scholars really “get it” and see it as an important form of public outreach, as well as of building and sustaining a transnational intellectual community. Others really don’t get it. There’s less hostility than there used to be, but there’s still a surprising amount of ignorance about the whole thing. That doesn’t just involve negative preconceptions: some people really overestimate the impact and advantages of blogging. We discuss this a bit in my podcast interview with Dan Drezner. There’s been rapid growth in acceptance of blogging – and even the notion that scholars should be blogging. But there’s still resistance: some scholars don’t like how it upsets the old status hierarchy, others worry that it distracts from rigorous scholarship.

 

What is specific about promoting an academic blog? From your perspective what is the recipe for a successful IR blog?

 

If I knew the answer, the Duck of Minerva would have much greater readership.

 

What role do pop culture references play in blogging about IR?

 

Depends on the blogger(s), I suppose. In general, academic blogging has a different culture than standard scholarly engagement. It is looser, snarkier, and more intellectually promiscuous. I think of it as more like the kind of conversations you find in the bar at academic conferences than in the panels themselves.

 

To what extent can social networking sites replace academic blogs?

 

That’s a good question. It is somewhat ironic that academic blogging is taking off at the same time that the center of activity is shifting toward twitter and other forms of micro-blogging.

 

How international is IR blogosphere? Which countries are underrepresented? How important is blogging in English for foreign scholars’ participation in global academic community?

 

These are great questions for rigorous study. English remains the lingua franca of academic blogging, but I expect that will change in ways that follow general trends—which include the diminution of the importance of English. A little over a year ago I attempted to develop a list of English-language academic IR blogs outside of the so-called “anglosphere” – and even asked non-US friends about non-English academic IR blogs. My sense at the time is that there’s, shall we say, a lot of room for growth.

 

You can find out more about the Duck of Minerva from Daniel Nexon's interview with SAGE

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