Embracing our (non-scholarly) identities: The benefits of combining engagement with moral activism.

The characteristics and lack of boundaries in social media present clear opportunities for scholars to engage communities in analytical dialogue. Many scholars feel pressed to remain morally neutral, so it can feel risky to engage in such commentary. But Brent E. Sasley and Mira Sucharov find there may actually be intellectual and social justice benefits to exploring insider identities and connecting engagement with moral activism

Scholarly vs. Activist Identities: What standards should govern academic engagement in the public sphere?

Social media allows scholars to discuss and debate current affairs like never before, but these media can also hinder a productive and thoughtful academic exchange. Brent E. Sasley and Mira Sucharov examine and assess one academic’s tweets on the Israel-Gaza crisis and the questions raised over his style and approach. Scholars should be encouraged to express moral outrage, but given the speed at which Twitter operates, scholars may need to also pay particular attention to how messages are being received

Individuals and the significance of affect : foreign policy variation in the Middle East

This dissertation seeks to expand our understanding of variation in foreign policy. Although we have a series of large, extant literatures dealing with the sources of foreign policy, there has been less attention paid over the last decade to understanding why states change their behavior. At the same time, the thesis argues that foreign policy change is best understood as a result of the role of individual decision-makers and the role that emotion plays in their foreign policy calculations.Foreign policy depends on the decisions made by individual leaders. The type of individual thus determines the specific policy. Here individuals are categorized as ideological or adaptable. Ideological individuals are more rigid in their belief structures, are more likely to select policies that fit with their extant understandings of the world and the position of their state in it, and more likely to rely on the emotional or affective appeal an object or issue holds for them. Adaptable leaders are more flexible, not tied to specific ideologies or reliant on emotion to guide their thinking, and thus more likely to choose or learn ideas that best respond to changing environmental conditions. At the same time, how a state's decision-making institutions are structured tells us how likely it is that an individual's own predilections matter. In polities where decision-making is centralized (e.g., in the office of the prime minister), individuals have greater leeway to put their ideas (whether based on their ideological outlooks or shifting environmental circumstances) into practice, while in de-centralized polities other actors constrain the leader from autonomous decision-making. In such cases, it is likely that an individual's ideas will conform to those of the constraining actors. Finally, the role of ideas is taken into consideration, as the dominant national ideas about foreign policy regarding a specific issue-area help us better understand the context in which individuals make (or change) foreign policy.This model is tested against alternate explanations---systemic imperatives, Constructivism, public opinion, poliheuristic theory, and prospect theory---in two case studies: the Israeli decision to pursue and sign the 1993 Oslo Accords, and the 2002 decision by the Islamist government in Turkey to actively lobby for membership in the European Union. Both foreign policies represent significant variation, and both provide important theoretical and empirical puzzles for scholars