Today, I took the family to the Will Rogers Memorial Museum in Claremore, Oklahoma. If you've never heard of Rogers, then you might want to learn. He was quite a man.Rogers was an entertainer, a writer, a public speaker, amateur philosopher, etc. In 1931, he went on...
Not to remind everyone enjoying their holidays that Spring Semester is right around the corner, but I need to ask for help with my World Politics 101 syllabus. I'll be traveling on research early in...
Yeh, I just can't stop celebrating all the awesome holidays at this time of year. Boxing Day, celebrated throughout the Commonwealth, has in many places become a version of Black Friday, but the...
It seems the CIA has a new wrinkle to its counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan--bribing warlords for support with little blue pills. Viagra has become the latest weapon in the war on terror....
From the text of Virginia O'Hanlon's letter to The Sun and the editor's response, printed September 21, 1897:"We take pleasure in answering thus prominently the communication below, expressing at the same time our great gratification that its faithful author is numbered among the friends of The Sun:"Dear Editor--I am 8 years old."Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus."Papa says, 'If you see it in The Sun, it's so.'"Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus? - Virginia O'Hanlon, 115 West Ninety-fifth StreetVirginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected...
One of the benefits of a high-powered player appointed to lead State is that you can get someone willing and able to be assertive about the place of diplomacy in the conduct of US Foreign Policy. This, I think, is on balance a good thing, as the NYT reports:Even before taking office, Hillary Rodham Clinton is seeking to build a more powerful State Department, with a bigger budget, high-profile special envoys to trouble spots and an expanded role in dealing with global economic issues at a time of crisis.She's filling both Deputy Secretary slots--who even knew there was a second...
Sufganiot and Latkes for all. As I am perhaps the only one of the Tribe who dislikes latkes, I fully embrace the jelly doughnut as a religious celebration today.Last night, my wife and I were out at Barnes and Nobel, and ended up buying a book for our son. We had picked up a Dr. Seuss classic, as he's really starting to enjoy them.In line I was making a slight mockery of the Chanukah cards that they had displayed. Its not exactly a holiday you send cards for. I was wondering who was still a bundle of nerves, having so much Chanukah decorating to do, so much to get ready, with the one candle...
This issue of International Studies Quarterly contains an interesting article about the effect of donors on both the agenda and strategies of human rights NGOs. Here's the abstract:"Focusing on the flow of funding to human rights non-governmental organizations (NGOs), we begin in this article to broach one of the least studied issues pertaining to transnational regimes—namely, their material underpinnings. Through an analysis of the patterns of donor funding to human rights NGOs, we underscore the triangulation between states, donors, and rights NGOs, whereby states have an impact on donor...
Yglesias points out an interview Condi Rice gave where she claimed:And I’m especially, as a political scientist, not as Secretary of State, not as National Security Advisor, but as somebody who knows that structurally it matters that a geostrategically important country like Iraq is not Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.Matt astutely points out that:My colleague Ryan Powers reminds us that, in fact, many of the leading lights of the international relations subfield of political science tried to warn the country against the invasion of Iraq. The warning he links to is a full-page NYT advertisement...
On the last day of class in "Rules of War," I ask my students what kinds of things are needed to strengthen the regime governing the conduct of war. They come up with all kinds of nifty ideas, and then I ask them what they'll personally do to move the world in that direction. For awhile they struggle to come up with anything more concrete than "raise awareness," but after awhile they will say things like, "run for office," or "join the State Department," or "go to work for Doctors Without Borders." They rarely say they'll join the military and work from within to uphold the spirit of the...
This weekend, I traveled to Washington with five of my "Global Agenda-Setting" students for their final exam. It consisted of an oral presentation of their collaboratively authored strategy paper at the headquarters of the NGO for whom the document was prepared, the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict. It was an extremely polished brilliant presentation, the culmination of an enormous amount of work, and I felt enormously tremendously proud watching it (and the CIVIC staffers' positive reactions). I also shared the students' relief that, after a month of late nights agonizing over...