Aarie Glas

On this page I provide resources and links for students.

The first section provides documents that I share with my graduate students, including guides for the MA and PhD process and some suggestions for thinking about elements of graduate school “beyond the program.” I also link to handful of resources regarding reading, writing, and publishing with both graduate and undergraduate students in mind.

In the second section, I’ve complied some useful online resources for students interested in IR and IR Theory, Southeast Asian international relations, and interpretive methodologies and methods. This page also includes a handful of links to data and documents related to my own research on international and regional organizations and conflict.

Student Resources

My Guides:

• My “Beyond the Program Advice for Graduate Students” (PDF) guide offers advice for NIU graduate students regarding research and teaching training, conferencing, funding, and more.
• My “Doctoral Prospectus Process and Expectations” (PDF) guide outlines my expectations of my students as they write their prospectus.
• My “IR Candidacy Exam Recommendations” (PDF) offers my suggestions for students preparing for the IR candidacy or “comp” exam required of PhD students.
• My “MA Thesis Supervision Expectations” (PDF) guide outlines my expectations of my MA students as they propose and then write their thesis.

Additional suggestions:

Reading: Reading academic articles and book chapters is often a challenge for undergraduate and graduate students a like! Amelia Hoover Green‘s “How to Read Political Science: A Guide in Four Steps” (PDF) offers a nice, quick guide to reading effectively.

Proposal Writing: Alison Philips offers a great interdisciplinary and general review of what goes into a graduate research proposal here. For my students, I encourage you to review my own guides (above) and work with me to devise a process that best suits your specific project.

Writing Articles: Jessica Calarco has been kind enough to produce and share a really clear outline for thinking about writing a qualitative research paper or article. While it won’t fit all projects, it’s a great structure to consider for many.

Publishing Advice: Mirya Holman has produced a really useful publishing checklist to consult while working on articles or chapters. Journals and presses offer detailed guidelines regarding editing and presentation. Students should consult the publishing pages of the outlets they are considering.

Book Review Advice : Krisztina Csortea, the book review editor at International Affairs, has a very useful article: “Writing an academic book review: five top tips and two things to avoid.”

Job Market Advice: Anna Meier has some great resources for students and junior scholars on the academic market. And “The Professor Is In” is widely utilized as well.

Referencing: The Chicago Manual of Style is a useful resource for Chicago style citations and I recommend this for my undergraduate courses. Another straightforward option is APA style, and you can find some useful information and instructions here. The University of Toronto Library Services also offers a useful guide to citation practices more generally. Students may wish to review their note (and further links) regarding plagiarism as well.

Links and Other Resources:

International Relations and IR Theory Online

For good overviews of research across topics in IR, check out the Oxford Bibliographies in International Relations series. You can find an entry from me there on diplomacy in ASEAN.

Theory Talks offers a theory-focused (unsurprisingly!) series of interviews with leading IR scholars. Well worth a day procrastinating!

The Monkey Cage is a Washington Post-hosted and very active blog exploring a huge breadth of Political Science issues, including and beyond IR. You can find a short article by me there as well.

E-International Relations hosts many articles and interviews focused on core IR issues and theory. It is a fantastic and open-access resource for undergraduate students. They also host a small section of resources on ASEAN.

Duck of Minerva is a wide-ranging IR blog established by Dan Nexon, Rodger Payne, and Patrick Thaddeus Jackson.

Duck of Minerva Podcasts, are a series of podcasts hosted by the above noted blog. There, you’ll find Jarrod Hayes‘ Duck Calls podcast, the Whiskey and IR Theory podcast by Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, and Brent Steele‘s Hayseed Scholar.

International Affairs Blog is, perhaps needless to say, the blog for the journal, International Affairs. The blog has some great posts to explore IR and abridged accounts of recent IA articles. Here is a link to my own, exploring governance practices within the African Union.

Foreign Affairs is a very accessible semi-scholarly journal covering a host of issues in IR and beyond.

Daniel Drezner regularly offers his thoughts on a host of security-related issues at the Washington Post.

The Council on Foreign Relations hosts a wide-ranging blog with commentaries and reports on all things foreign relations. The CFR also hosts a number of podcasts, including the President’s Inbox, which is a great resource for students of US foreign policy.

Reddit is great. And for more than just cats, gifs and cat-filled gifs! More than occasionally this IR sub-reddit provides some interesting links and discussion that are worth a look.

Southeast Asian International Relations Online

NIU’s own Center for Southeast Asian Studies (CSEAS) regularly hosts events and shares resources online related to ASEAN and regional politics.

Eric Jones’s Southeast Asia Crossroads Podcast is widely popular and wide-ranging in focus, and often examines issues related to international relations and ASEAN. You can hear me on the podcast a few times: in 2017 speaking with Alice Ba and John Brandon on the occasion of ASEAN’s 50th anniversary here and in 2021 speaking with Dylan Loh, Deepak Nair, and Philips Vermonte on ASEAN’s response to 2021 coup in Myanmar here.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Jakarta, Indonesia hosts excellent commentaries, reports and other resources regarding ASEAN and timely issues in the region (e.g. the South China Sea, COVID and more). However, their site is often very, very slow to load!

Another Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington USA-based one this time, runs an active podcast series, “Asia Chessboard,” exploring Asian politics (broadly speaking) and is often focused on US-Asia relations.

The ASEAN Studies Center in the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, and its Perspectives publication in particular, offers a wealth of reports and analysis on ASEAN and pressing regional issues.

The Council on Foreign Relations, as noted above as well, is great for a wide range of interests. It regularly hosts commentaries and reports on Southeast Asia and Asia more generally. This was previously known as CFR’s “Asia Unbound” section and it surveys a range of issues from domestic politics and elections to regional security and US-ASEAN relations.

The Diplomat is another wide-ranging – and I think best – online resource for insight into the Asia-Pacific region, with some excellent commentary regarding politics in and of Southeast Asia. Their “ASEAN Beat” section is particularly useful.

Interpretive Methodologies and Methods Online

The Interpretive Methodologies and Methods (IMM) group of the American Political Science Association (APSA) hosts information and events related to interpretive methods, including online resources and syllabi. IMM also hosts an active email list with news, discussions, and events shared often. Disclosure: I coordinate the online activities of the IMM, so if there is a problem with the site it’s likely my fault!

The APSA’s Qualitative & Multi-Methods Section, run through Syracuse University’s Maxwell Institute’s Center for Qualitative and Multi-Methods Inquiry (CQMI), offers an open-access journal/newsletter, Qualitative & Multi-Method Research. The publication showcases timely insights and debates concerning qualitative and interpretive methodologies and methods. You can find an article I co-authored in there as well.

NIU’s own Qualitative Inquiry Collaborative (QUIC) also offers useful resources and hosts events (online and on campus), and provides a regularly updated list of courses in qualitative methods at NIU.

Nick Cheesman hosts a great podcast on New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science. You can find me on an episode, discussing Lee Ann Fujii’s fantastic book, Interviewing in Social Science Research: A Relational Approach (Routledge, 2018).

The University of Utah’s Institute of Public and International Affairs, thanks to Peregrine Schwartz-Shea, hosts a few resources from the 2009 National Science Foundation Workshop on Interpretive Methodologies including a useful reading list. The IMM also hosts an archive from the event.

The University of Alberta‘s interdisciplinary International Institute for Qualitative Methodology (IIQM) hosts some great events and resources. They also offer some ‘webinars‘ that may be of interest to many.

Australian National University’s Interpretation, Method and Critique (IMC) Network and Research Cluster hosts some online events and a email list for news and events.

Beyond the major political science journals (e.g. PS: Political Science and Politics) and broader social science journals (e.g. Qualitative Research and Qualitative Inquiry) that publish on interpretive methods, students may find the open-access journal Forum: Qualitative Social Research useful for scholarly resources.

Data and Documents

UN Peacemaker is useful repository of UN documents.

The UN Archives Geneva is amazing. It hosts reams of UN and League of Nations agreements and documents online, alongside various (and variably online) private papers and documents from the broader international peace movement.

The ASEAN Secretariat Resource Center hosts a heap of useful documents and data, although navigating it can be a challenge!

The African Union Directorate of Peace and Security’s Resource Center has extensive online reports and documents related to continental security governance.

Our World in Data is a great resource for, well, data about the world! I use many of the figures and graphs in my lectures.

Mark Mullenbach’s Dynamic Analysis of Dispute Management (DADM) project offers case narratives of hundreds of inter-state disputes since the early 20th century, among other data and discussions.

Paul Hensel‘s personal webpage hosts an extensive set of useful resources for conflict research.

Erik Voeten‘s personal webpage hosts a great set of UN-related data.