APSA 2009

 I spent the last few days at the 2009 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association.  The meeting was in Toronto, which turns out to be a lovely city with a vibrant waterfront corniche and plenty to do — although the new customs procedures and passport restrictions seem like a very retrogade step, making the whole process much, much more onerous than I remember from all those day trips to Montreal I used to love.   Ah well.  Here are a few takeaways from the meeting:

1. Peter Katzenstein’s Presidential address.   My dissertation adviser and long-time friend Peter Katzenstein of Cornell University gave a challenging and powerful Presidential address.  He moved beyond his long-time championing of methodological and analytical diversity to offer a comprehensive pluralist and multi-civilizational reading of world politics and American foreign policy.  He challenged the Huntingtonian notion of clashing civilizations and Realist models of clashing states in international relations, while also offering a reading of U.S. foreign policy deeply rooted in the American encounter with race and the legacies of the civil war.  I’m hoping to see a text of the speech soon to be able to say more.
2. America’s Standing in the World.  I’ve spent the last year serving on a Presidential task force on America’s standing in the world, organized by Katzenstein and Jeff Legro of the University of Virginia (it should be up on the APSA web site soon).   The task force, which met several times over the last year, included a wide range of political scientists, including Foreign Policy’s Dan Drezner, my GWU colleagues Marty Finnemore and Henry Nau, and many more. I’ll be talking about our findings and arguments in a separate post so won’t say much more here.  But the panel — with comments by Theda Skocpol, John Ruggie, and Aaron Friedberg — was one of the highlights of the APSA. I spoke at the "regional perspectives" task force panel in the afternoon.  While it was intellectually rewarding, in terms of attendance let’s just say that we went head to head with Andy Pettite and the Yankees-Blue Jays game, and we didn’t win.
3. The Middle East remains under-represented. I attended most of the Middle East panels which I could fit into my schedule… which was close to all of the Middle East panels.  There were some very good papers presented on Islamist political parties, and a few intriguing papers scattered through more general conceptually oriented panels, but virtually nothing else. I spoke at a panel focused on the relationship between democratization and terrorism in the Arab world — based on a book put together by academics (led by my friend Dalia Dassa Kaye) who work not for universities but for the RAND Corporation.   The problems I identified with Middle East political science last year clearly remain. I will be returning to this issue, at this year’s MESA and in other arenas quite soon. 
4. Advice for presenters.  Just a few suggestions. If you have 15 minutes to present your paper, don’t spend 12 on literature review and methodology.  If your argument rests on burning a straw man, the straw man had better burn.  If you want to claim that you are presenting a novel hypothesis, make sure that it isn’t actually the default conventional wisdom in the field.   And if you want to be taken seriously when applying your theory to a particular case, make sure you know how to pronounce the name of the country’s leader. 
5. "The Israel Lobby at 2." Hands down winner for most pretentious panel title — sorry, Steve!  I really tried to make it to the panel, but 8:00 AM on Saturday morning defeated me.  Anyone who was there and wants to report, let me know! 

Later today — reflections on the most interesting panel I attended, on the state of the field in the study of civil wars and genocide and how it applies to Iraq. And my take on Jay-Z’s Blueprint 3.