Pierre de Fermat (Quelle: Wikimedia Commons)
I shouldn’t and won’t ever claim to be as brilliant as Fermat. When he scribbled his famous theorem by the margins of a book he was reading (or so the legend goes), he was certainly referring to a proof that he had somewhere on paper and not just an idea. Else, he might have felt like I do right now. (weiterlesen…)
I think of myself as a theorist. And although I would claim that I have a basic understanding of the methodological and organisational difficulties facing empirical scientists, I still find it a challenge to make my theory speak to them.
Today I had the opportunity, together with some colleagues, to engage in an informal exchange with Jeffrey Checkel, who has been working on transnationalism for quite some time and is currently focusing on the transnational/social dynamics of civil war. It was an interesting and informing discussion and he was helpfully open to our different approaches and problems.