Nilay Saiya

The Statecraft Simulation and Foreign Policy Attitudes Among Undergraduate Students

ABSTRACT Professors of international relations are increasingly realizing that simulations can be a fun and effective way of teaching the complexities of the field to their students. One popular simulation that has emerged in recent years—the Statecraft simulation—is now used by more than 190 colleges and universities worldwide. Despite Statecraft’s popularity, however, little scholarship has attempted to assess its impact on learning objectives and students’ perceptions of the real world. This article attempts to help fill that void by evaluating Statecraft’s influence on foreign policy attitudes among undergraduate students. It finds that, while participation in Statecraft did not generally change students’ foreign policy preferences, it did have the effect of inducing foreign policy moderation among students who were initially very hawkish or dovish in their foreign policy orientations. The most important individual characteristics predicting foreign policy attitudes include a student’s political orientation and interest in the Statecraft simulation itself. The article concludes with some potential avenues for future research.

The religious freedom peace

Around the world, religions influence on societies and politics is increasing. Arguably religion is today a more salient feature of international politics than at any point in the last 300 years. Yet this increase in religions prominence comes at the precise time that religious expression has come under unprecedented assault from both state actions and communal hostilities involving religion. At the same time, religious extremism and violence have also been on the rise globally. This article makes the case that these two trends – repression of religion and resistance on the part of believers – are intertwined. Here, I survey four forms of violence: domestic religious terrorism, international religious terrorism, religious civil wars and interstate conflicts. In each case, I outline different pathways through which restrictions on religion lead to violence, marshal data derived and coded from conflict databases, and present brief case studies showing how states that hinder religious freedom are disproportionately more likely to both experience and give rise to all four forms of violence. On the other hand, religiously free countries are far less susceptible to and do not encourage religious violence. The article concludes with some recommendations for policy.

Blasphemy and terrorism in the Muslim world

ABSTRACT This article examines the effect of blasphemy laws on Islamist terrorism in Muslim-majority countries. Although passed with the ostensibly noble purpose of defending religion, I argue that blasphemy laws encourage terrorism by creating a culture of vigilantism in which terrorists, claiming to be the defenders of Islam, attack those they believe are guilty of heresy. This study empirically tests this proposition, along with alternative hypotheses, using a time-series, cross-national negative binomial analysis of 51 Muslim-majority states from 1991–2013. It finds that states that enforce blasphemy laws are indeed statistically more likely to experience Islamist terrorist attacks than countries where such laws do not exist. The statistical analysis is supplemented with a brief case study of blasphemy laws and terrorism in Pakistan. The conclusion situates the findings in the context of policy.

How Dangerous Are Virtual Worlds Really? A Research Note on the Statecraft Simulation Debate

This brief article weighs in on a pedagogical debate concerning the didactic usefulness of an online international relations computer simulation called Statecraft. In a 2014 article, Gustavo Carvalho, a teaching assistant at the University of Toronto, claimed, based on the results of a survey he administered to an international relations class that used Statecraft, that the simulation had little to offer students as a teaching tool. In a rebuttal, Statecraft creator Jonathan Keller took Carvalho to task for not employing the simulation properly, which biased his results. While Carvalho only presented results for one class, the present analysis reports on survey responses of students over six different classes which used Statecraft from 2013 to 2014. The results call into question Carvalho’s findings and suggest that the context and curriculum matter as much as the simulation itself when judging the pedagogical value of computer-mediated learning tools.

Review of Model Diplomacy

Model Diplomacy is a new interactive foreign policy simulation offered by the Council on Foreign Relations. The simulation uses hypothetical crises based on real-world challenges facing the United ...

Religion, state, and terrorism: A global analysis

ABSTRACT This article investigates two ways in which state involvement in religion—minority and majority restriction—generates terrorism. Using a time-series, cross-national negative binomial analysis of 174 countries from 1991–2009, this study finds that when religiously devout people find themselves marginalized through either form of religious restriction, they are more likely to pursue their aims through violence. The article concludes with recommendations for policymakers.

Testing the Hillary Doctrine

In her various roles as First Lady, Senator, Secretary of State, and Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton has long maintained that the subjugation of women poses a national security threat to the United States. Clinton’s proposition has come to be termed the “Hillary Doctrine.” Yet does this principle receive support from the empirical record? In this paper, we offer a test of the Hillary Doctrine by analyzing if more anti-American terrorism emanates from countries that restrict women’s rights than from countries that are not gender restrictive. Using a time series, cross-national analysis of 156 countries from the period 1981 to 2005, our negative binomial models offer strong support for the Hillary Doctrine and suggest that the promotion of women’s rights may well enhance the national security of the United States with respect to terrorism. These results are robust to a wide range of changes to the empirical research design.

Navigating the International Academic Job Market

Given the extraordinarily competitive academic job market in the United States, this article explores a relatively new prospect for American-trained political science PhD graduates: teaching at a foreign institution. The article proceeds in two parts. First, it discusses various benefits and challenges associated with working abroad. Second, it provides practical guidance for candidates considering the international job market.