A while back, Marc Lynch threw down the gauntlet and declared the last decade of international politics a vindication for the constructivist approach to international relations.Warning: what follows is a very long post, one that will be primarily of interest to people...
I've updated my "current reading" on the sidebar, which had gotten horribly out of date. I'm particularly enjoying Bryan Ward-Perkin's The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, which was...
Those of us in IR who do "constructivist" work (broadly speaking) spend a fair amount of time questioning the notion that things like states are usefully treated as more or less solid objects....
I present... a quiz! In reverse-"SAT reading comprehension" format. Later, perhaps, someone will post on Germany's electoral mess, what may prove to be the shortest-lasting North Korean deal yet,...
Nice post at the Glittering Eye. A small snippet:The disaster that has occurred in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast is enormously larger and will, undoubtedly, be significantly more costly than any of the disasters above. The size of the area affected is hundreds of square miles. We don’t yet know how many people were killed.There are several key factors that were present in all of the disasters reviewed above:Civil order was maintained immediately (sometimes ruthlessly) even while the disaster was in progress.Reconstruction efforts began immediately and were completely under local (and mostly...
Dan's absolutely right about progressivism, which among other things led us to the situation that we had for much of the twentieth century in which the role of the government involved providing services for citizens in need. The nature of the social contract was altered by such initiatives as Social Security, income taxes, and the Federal Reserve system: government became a way to coordinate resources so as to roughly equalize social opportunities and provide people with a "new deal."Welcome back to the 19th century, folks. If we doubted it before, it should be entirely apparent now: we now...
I haven't posted much, in part because I've been at APSA. But I also have trouble bringing myself to write anything more about Katrina. We lived in New York on September 11th, 2001; for all the horror of that day, the slow unfolding of the disaster in New Orleans, the gross incompetence of our government and our elected officials, and the bestial situation people faced in the refugee pens (what else are we supposed to call the Superdome, Convention Center, and a strip of I-10?) feels worse right now.We have met the enemy, and in so many different ways, it is us.After the hurricane, I wrote...
If you want to read a followup dispatch from New Orleans by Dr. Greg Henderson, I've found one and posted in on my blog. It's a holiday weekend, so I don't know how many people will be reading or searching. However, "Greg Henderson pathologist" has become a very popular search term for those finding my space in blogtopia. Filed as: Greg Henderson
This is the first year I've actually enjoyed APSA. The quality of the international-relations panels I attended was higher than I'm used to. The conference organizers did a great job of making sure that related panels were close together. I didn't have to do a lot of hopping between distant hotels.We had the usual SNAFUs. A number of panels with similar target audiences ran at the same time, making for hard choices about what to attend. The organizers also made a number of mistakes about what size room to assign to panels. I chaired a (very good) panel on event analysis which was highly...
This is a message I received in email from a third party. It was written in New Orleans by Dr. Greg Henderson, a pathologist who recently moved from Wilmington:Aug. 31, 2005I am writing this note on Tuesday at 2 PM. I wanted to update all of you as to the situation here. I don't know how much information you are getting but I am certain it is more than we are getting. Be advised that almost everything I am telling you is from direct observation or rumor from reasonable sources. They are allowing limited Internet access, so I hope to send this dispatch today.I am now a temporary resident of...