Authors
Intrastate Conflicts: Refocus on the Intractable
By Harold A. Young The burden and devastation of intrastate conflicts are disproportionally borne by people of color in the developing world. While many people of color in the United States may view these conflicts as distant, they are not. Some may have relatives and friends in these conflict…
Politics and Sunburn: Snapshot of the U.S. from Belize
By Harold Young, Ph.D. The sun blazed, cooled only by sporadic showers, during my recent visit to the Central American and Caribbean nation of Belize where I spent my formative years. The size of Massachusetts, Belize is racially and ethnically diverse population of 332,000 that depends heavily on…
Humanitarian Missile Attack? Responsibility to Protect (Redux)
“There’s not any sort of option where a political solution is going to happen with Assad at the head of the regime…. regime change is something that we think is going to happen because all of the parties are going to see that Assad is not the leader that needs to be taking place for Syria” - U.S.…
The Loss Lab
“Trump was an alternative to interchangeable robots whose goal is to avoid saying anything interesting.” - Molly Ball, political reporter, The Atlantic “If you wanted to write a playbook for how to lose an election, Trump did that and he won anyway.” - Steve Peoples, AP reporter What rotten luck…
Four Stormy Days - #MPSA17
This year’s MPSA has been an interesting experience as opposed to other years. That is due to a near perfect storm of political events in the last few months. Add to this already interesting mix the fact that, due to inclement weather and flight cancellations, we end up with a more intimate…
Election 2016: Did New Voting Laws Tip the Balance?
Since the early 2000s, a flurry of new voting laws have passed in the states. There is a marked Democrat-Republican divide. Democratic-leaning states, such as California, Oregon, and Massachusetts, have passed laws making access to the ballot easier. Oregon now automatically registers citizens to…
Ruling by Distraction
To rule by distraction is a time-tested tool of autocratic and authoritarian regimes. It is a go-to move for non-democratic regimes when faced with a challenge, domestic or international. As the name suggests, this approach is simple but effective. The idea is to create enough chaos and…
Alone and Working: Making the Transition to ABD
The change from being a PhD Student to a PhD Candidate is a big one. The moment we cross that threshold of becoming ABD, we fall in to a kind of purgatory where we are no longer students and not yet peers of our professors. This purgatory, or as it is better known as ABD, is something that no one…
Race and “Ism”: Incoming Fire from All Directions
Since it is impossible to discuss the issue of racism from the beginning, I will just start where I find myself. As an Assistant professor, it is probably safe for me to say that the multi-directional pressures and demands from administrations, departments, students, and parents are universal in…
Polling for the 2016 Presidential Election: What Went Wrong?
As I write, Donald Trump is less than two weeks from being inaugurated as President of the United States. For political scientists, our “what the…?” moment involves the failure of most public-opinion polls to predict the results of the 2016 election. I joined numerous colleagues in assuming a…