IR 2.0

Charli Carpenter and I have a co-authored a paper in the August 2010 issue of International Studies Perspectives entitled, "International Relations 2.0: The Implications of New Media for an Old Profession."  It’s on the effect that Web 2.0 technologies are having on the study and practice of international relations.  The abstract:  The International Relations (IR) ...

By , a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast.

Charli Carpenter and I have a co-authored a paper in the August 2010 issue of International Studies Perspectives entitled, "International Relations 2.0: The Implications of New Media for an Old Profession."  It's on the effect that Web 2.0 technologies are having on the study and practice of international relations.  The abstract: 

Charli Carpenter and I have a co-authored a paper in the August 2010 issue of International Studies Perspectives entitled, "International Relations 2.0: The Implications of New Media for an Old Profession."  It’s on the effect that Web 2.0 technologies are having on the study and practice of international relations.  The abstract: 

The International Relations (IR) profession has not fully taken stock of the way in which user-driven information technologies—including Blogger, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Wikipedia—are reshaping our professional activities, our subject matter, and even the constitutive rules of the discipline itself. In this study, we reflect on the ways in which our own roles and identities as IR scholars have evolved since the advent of “Web 2.0”: the second revolution in communications technology that redefined the relationship between producers and consumers of online information. We focus on two types of new media particularly relevant to the practice and the profession of IR: blogs and social networking sites.

If you ask me, it’s worth reading just for the Bill Watterson citation. Still, as Charli has already observed:

Of course if scholarly journal lag-time weren’t what it is we had written this more recently than thirteen months ago, we’d probably have also talked about the data generation possibilities of tools like Wikileaks.

Carpenter has fortunately plugged this gap with ferocity in the past week — see here and here. Charli’s quick turnaround on this issue should provide a credible signal to readers as to which of us was the brains and which of us was the beauty in this particular joint venture. 

[Her both times?—ed.  Um…. pretty much, yeah.]

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner

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