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The scholarly study of international relations tends to go over the same cases, issues, and themes. This book addresses this by challenging readers to think creatively about international politics. It highlights some of the strangest and rarest phenomena in diplomacy and world politics. Comprised of a series of vignettes and organized by common themes like nonsensical borders, quasi-countries, and diplomatic taboos, Weird IR encourages readers to think critically about the discipline without losing one's sense of humor completely. David Bell Mislan is Assistant Professor of International Studies at American University, USA. Philip Streich is Assistant Professor of Human Sciences at Osaka University, Japan.--

In the last decade the concept of disaster diplomacy has drawn interest to the links between major natural disasters and international conflict. This paper reviews the disparate set of works covering this relationship. This body of work, which draws on multiple disciplinary traditions extending over three generations, holds vast potential for political scientists that seek to understand the intersection of ecological catastrophe and politics. The latest wave of publications has the greatest potential to yield valuable and generalizable insight into political phenomena as well as to produce practical knowledge for disaster-related organizations and agencies, policymakers, and citizens. This paper reviews the three generations of literature and then makes suggestions along three lines of argument: (1) refining definitions of variables, (2) refining the concept of 'disaster diplomacy', and (3) using existing theories and concepts of interstate conflict. Adapted from the source document.

Although many decisions involve a stream of payoffs over time, political scientists have given little attention to how actors make the required tradeoffs between present and future payoffs, other than applying the standard exponential discounting model from economics. After summarizing the basic discounting model, we identify some of its leading behavioral anomalies—declining discount rates; preference reversals; higher discount rates for smaller payoffs than for larger payoffs and for gains than for losses; framing effects based on expectations; and a preference for ascending rather than descending sequences. We examine the leading alternative models of discounting and then apply a quasi-hyperbolic discount model to the problem of cooperation in iterated Prisoner's Dilemma games. We demonstrate that if actors display the widely observed tendency to highly discount the immediate future, then cooperation in an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma game is more difficult than Axelrod suggests.