Few observers of African politics look to Namibia to anticipate continent-wide trends. On November 27 however, the country could become a bellwether when Namibians vote in presidential and parliamentary elections. The results will provide clues to three key questions whose consequences will reverberate beyond Namibia’s borders. First, the election will indicate whether the era of liberation movements that have dominated Southern Africa for decades is coming to an end. Second,

Archduke Franz Ferdinand arrived in Sarajevo in late June 1914 unaware that a squad of six assassins was already waiting for him. The assassins were equipped with bombs and revolvers and each also carried cyanide powder to commit suicide once their deed was done. Few onlookers expected the day’s tribulations as the archduke’s motorcade rolled into Sarajevo. The streets were decorated with Habsburg black-and-yellow flags and the day’s weather was superb. The guest’s security d

The most grueling part of getting my PhD was not writing the hundreds of pages that turned into my dissertation (that was a close second). The most arduous experience was actually applying for academic jobs right at the end of my time in graduate school. I think it is more or less common knowledge nowadays but when I started graduate studies back in 2016, I had no idea that the chances of getting a job in academia are so very slim. I entered graduate school fully expecting th

One of the things gym aficionados struggle to explain to fitness neophytes is that frequent physical activity can develop a wide variety of life skills, some of which are barely related to lifting weights. I want to describe my own experience with how planking – a nifty little exercise that involves holding the trunk part of your body in a straight line off the ground – taught me how to process difficult emotions. I have been doing planks for well over a decade but only recen

This post is meant to serve as an introduction to the art of reading academic research articles for casual, non-expert readers such as undergraduate students. As such, it does not presuppose any knowledge of statistics or even the scientific method. The goal is to give the neophyte reader a set of rudimentary tools that can be implemented regardless of what research question a paper tackles. The hope is that readers will be able to extract from an article the kind of informat

One of the side effects of the coronavirus pandemic is undoubtedly the challenge of remaining productive under lockdown. Many of my friends and acquaintances have shared with me that they find it difficult to maintain their daily routines and I have felt some of the more challenging effects of the home office myself. At the outset, I think it is important to acknowledge that the lockdown conditions are truly unique and undiminished productivity may not be an appropriate goal.

I could be wrong but I think that the key to human success is the ability to make ourselves do things we essentially do not want to do. It is almost like the law of gravity: things fall to the ground unless there is some energy that picks them up or prevents them from falling further. A successful economy is basically a system in which as many people as possible are motivated to work as hard and smart as they can, ideally in concert. A successful relationship is one where peo

Perhaps the most daunting challenge to anyone who hopes to live a life well lived is that it involves incessant balancing of essentially irreconcilable contradictions. One strives to be brave, empathetic, loving, emotionally present, and yet sufficiently assertive, all at the same time. Unfortunately, the intuitive answer that one should exhibit these characteristics in moderation – neither too much nor too little – will often not do. Consider empathy. It is surely possible t

I spent nearly all of July and August of this year travelling across Namibia. This time, my goal was not to enjoy a long vacation, though I did enjoy my time in Namibia. I traveled to the country of my wife’s birth to advance my dissertation research which centers on traditional institutions of governance. Although they are rare in North America and Europe, traditional leaders do a great deal of governing in Africa and the developing world in general. In fact, in many African

We are living in an era of considerable polarization. A simple definition of polarization might be something like this: the tendency for attitudes to diverge to extremes. Students of American politics would point to indicators such as voting behavior in Congress to evidence that polarization has gotten worse over the last, say, twenty years. But even outside politics, polarization is generally viewed negatively. We are told that talking to the other side is important because

V posledních několika letech jsem byl účastníkem mnoha konverzací, které si kladly za cíl jasně definovat rozdíly mezi termíny „college“ a „university,“ tedy výrazy, které se v anglicky mluvícím světě používají k označení vysoké školy. Já sám jsem si s rozdíly nikdy hlavu nedělal (hned vysvětlím proč), ale jelikož často vídám otázky pídících se po oněch odlišnostech, rozhodl jsem se k tématu napsat několik řádek. Kdybych měl slova college a university přirovnat k Vennovým dia

Just when we thought that the long-discredited economic doctrine of mercantilism has died, it seems to have made a comeback. Indeed, even though widely accepted economic theory holds that trade is not a zero-sum game, leading policymakers such as the US president appear to believe that trade is a battle over the world’s resources like any other. Importantly however, even voices that have long argued for the undisputed benefits of free trade have recently jumped on the bandwag

One of the most captivating debates of the last decade that has engaged academic economists and the general public alike has concerned the propriety of state intervention in the face of economic recession. After the 2008 financial crisis, the so-called Keynesians, following the recommendation of the iconic British economist John Maynard Keynes, have argued that governments should spend massive amounts of money in order to revive their countries’ economies. Scholars such as Pa

This is a commencement speech which I wrote in the months preceding my college graduation in May 2016. The speech was never delivered but it does, today as it did then, express some of the fundamental beliefs and values that, today as they were then, are challenged on what should be their home turf - college campuses. source: photo archive of the author (May 2013) *** Like trees planted by rivers of water,[1] we arrived on this hill four years ago. A few weeks into our first

I have just returned from a two-month research trip to Southern Africa which took me to Namibia, Botswana, and Zambia. Although I have been to Namibia a number of times, this was my first time in Botswana and Zambia and I am fortunate to share that things went quite well. I was particularly surprised by my positive experience in Zambia. I found state bureaucrats willing to help, extensive data free and available, and the capital of Lusaka safe and relatively easy to navigate.

In September 2016, the Nobel laureate Robert J. Shiller penned an opinion piece titled The Coming Anti-National Revolution. In his article, Mr. Shiller observes that For the past several centuries, the world has experienced a sequence of intellectual revolutions against oppression of one sort or another. These revolutions operate in the minds of humans and are spread – eventually to most of the world – not by war (which tends to involve multiple causes), but by language and c

The recent infamous decision by Donald Trump to withdraw from the Paris Accord, which is the result of a global effort to combat climate change, once again displayed the current administration’s willingness to abandon genuine and generous global leadership, and pointed to the unfortunate nature of the discourse on climate change itself. Those of us who harbor no predispositions to support the course on which the current president has taken the United States realize that the c

Practically every student who has ever taken a course in regression analysis and statistics in general will recall that phenomena are conceptualized to have systematic as well as stochastic variation. As a running example, let us consider a model we might build to explain the causes of democratization. We might plausibly claim that whether or not a country democratizes in a given year is the result of the country’s wealth, population, and average level of education. These thr

Jeden z posledních průzkumů veřejného mínění, který mne v nedávné době nepatřičně zaujal, informuje o relativně robustní důvěře značné části veřejnosti v dnes již takřka bývalého ministra financí Andreje Babiše. Nepatřičně především proto, že reflektuje dlouhodobý fenomén, který provází jak vzestup samotného pána Kosteleckých uzenin, tak i nálady a dispozice českého voličstva prakticky od poloviny devadesátých let, a pozorného studenta české politiky by tak neměl překvapit. P

I have recently come across a book which addresses one of the most fundamental questions that has troubled philosophers and social scientists alike: what is it that makes our enquiry scientific? The book I intend to engage in this text bears the title A Model Discipline and it was authored by Kevin A. Clarke and David M. Primo, both of which are professors of political science at the University of Rochester. There is much in their oeuvre that I happen to disagree with but the