For the past several years, Adriana Lins de Albuquerque and Alicia Cheng have been publishing "Op-Charts" in the January NY Times with a visual representation of deaths in Iraq, with the deaths neatly broken down according to civilian, police, coalition troop, US...
I have a longstanding apathy towards State of the Union addresses. If a President says anything important (like declaring states part of an "axis of evil"), then I figure that the text serves just...
A first hand account of my brush with Campaign 2008.Barak Obama gave a big speech at American University today with the Kennedy's to receive the endorsements of Ted, Caroline, and Patrick Kennedy....
Parag Khanna has, in essence, a précis of his forthcoming book in today's New York Times Magazine. The article, entitled, "Waving Goodbye to Hegemony", contends that American hegemony is already...
So this past week I traveled to New York to conduct interviews with representatives of the Holy's See's Permanent Obverver Mission to the United Nations as part of my project into norm contestation among global civil society actors during multilateral treaty negotiations. I found the papal diplomats to be informed, open-minded, friendly and intellectually engaged about human rights and human security. But they didn't at all like the idea that I was interviewing them as part of a project on "non-state" influences on UN treaty-making.They imagined I'd be interviewing other governments as well,...
Does the press often serve as "government's little helper"?As you might guess, I am still thinking about the apparent failure of the public sphere (or "marketplace of ideas" if you prefer) to work properly during foreign policy crises. Many readers graciously provided interesting and helpful comments on my post from last week. Thank you! For now, however, I continue to explore the academic literature about the alleged timidity of journalists during such crises.In 1990, University of Washington scholar Lance Bennett theorized that journalists "index" the slant of their news coverage to the...
Not long ago, Charli posted about Deborah Boucoyannis' provocative Perspectives on Politics article, "The International Wanderings of a Liberal Idea, or Why Liberals Can Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Balance of Power" (PDF). A number of readers and contributors commented on Charli's post and the article. Now, Deborah responds:Note: I've put the original comments she's responding to in blockquotes. Her comments are formatted normally.Yet her attempt to redefine realism as, in essence, hegemonic-order theory strikes me as strained.Well, it’s not just hegemonic theory that I am defining...
It was the first thing that came to my mind when I saw this photo on the NYT site. Provocative (or maybe just dark humor), but potentially not that far off the mark.My short take on this is that I don't think its good for the Olmert government and their Gaza policy at all, and its a big win for Hamas. If nothing else, it hands Hamas a major legitimacy claim as the one group who cares about the regular person enough to blow open a wall to Egypt so people can bring back to Gaza much needed food, tires, cigarettes, and cases of Coke.First runner up for the headline: "Follow me! Follow me to...
OK, so things are tense between Britain and Russia these days. But this breathless headline from the BBC is really over the top: "Russia warns of nuclear defence".The meat of the article is only a little less hysterical:Russia's military chief of staff has said Moscow is ready to use force, including pre-emptively and with nuclear weapons, to defend itself.Under what conditions would Russia use nuclear weapons?In a speech to a military conference broadcast on state-run cable TV, Gen Baluyevsky said there were potential threats to Russia from international terrorism or countries seeking...
So my Spring Semester class “Rules of War” has kicked off here at Pitt. I’ve been inspired by the Duck to foreswear Blackboard and get my students blogging (pseudononymously, of course) for their online participation grade. This week’s homework: evaluate whether Lieutenant Ehren Watada’s defense at his court martial last February constituted an accurate interpretation of the international rules derived from just war theory. Facts of the matter: Lieutenant Watada joined the US Army after 9/11 but refused to deploy to Iraq with his unit because in his view, the war was illegal. He has since...
This week I visited the Kennedy School to attend a symposium on Security Sector Reform (SSR). SSR aims to bring organizations with the authority to use or order the use of force better in line with the rule of law and the needs of ordinary people. The speakers at the symposium were particularly concerned with how to make security forces – police, peacekeepers, soldiers, the judiciary – more accountable to women’s needs, so that for example private military contractors wouldn’t get off scot free after trafficking women and girls in Kosovo. And they were particularly concerned with how human...
Goldberg's definition of fascism:Fascism is a religion of the state. It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people. It is totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified to achieve that common good. It takes responsibility for all aspects of life, including our health and well-being, and seeks to impose uniformity of thought and action, whether by force or through regulation and social pressure. Everything, including the economy and religion, must be aligned with its...