Many years ago, I attended a talk by Michael Shapiro. He was doing something on memory and place, and showed a clip from some Steve Martin movie--Father of the Bride, maybe II--and a colleague of mine, ever the concerned young scholar, said Yes, but Professor Shapiro,...
In a Reuters op-ed yesterday, Bernd Debusmann makes "the business case for high seas piracy":As far as illicit businesses with low risk and high rewards go, it doesn't get much better than piracy on...
Last night, at a couple of gatherings with family and friends, some people were speculating that Afghanistan could become Barack Obama's Vietnam -- or Iraq. A blogger at the socialist Monthly Review...
If you're like me (or Dan) and you live in the U.S., you spent much of yesterday's holiday feeling lucky to be living in America and not in Goma (or Mumbai. Or Darfur.) Well, in the spirit of Dan's...
Rob Farley Scott Lemieux (sorry, Scott):Somehow, this doesn't seem like the right time for a chipper Thanksgiving greeting...The terror attack on Mumbai certainly sucks the cheer out of Thanksgiving.In fact, almost every Thanksgiving something terrible is happening somewhere in the world, whether headline grabbing or not. For over ten years, to take but two examples, it has been a pretty good bet that unspeakably awful (and probably non-headline grabbing) events are taking place in the Congo or the Sudan.This is probably an inevitable consequence of a globalized world. It isn't so much that...
Its Thanksgiving, one of my favorite holidays. I'm in Ohio, visiting family in Cleveland and Canton. Driving out here Tuesday night was quite the adventure, there's nothing like a minor snow storm on the Pennsylvania turn pike. When we finally did arrive at 1:30am, the driveway was slick and my car couldn't make it up! There's nothing like shoveling a driveway at 1:30am. There's snow on the ground here--something that is a fact of life in Cleveland but inconceivable back in DC. Yesterday I baked pies. Two plus a small mini-pie. Pumpkin. Used the recipe on the side of the pumpkin can, and...
Daniel Sekulitch provides an update on the pirate "mothership" sunk by India last week in a much-trumpeted police action on the high seas:"It has now been confirmed by the IMB's Piracy Reporting Centre that the vessel sunk last week by an Indian warship was not a pirate mothership but, rather, a fishing boat that had been hijacked by pirates. The Thai-owned fishing boat, Ekawat Nava 5, had been commandeered early on November 18 and the crew had been tied up by their captors, according to the shipowner. Later that same day, the Indian Navy Ship Tabar encountered the Ekawat Nava 5 and ordered...
The New York Times reports:A parliamentary hearing on the origins of the war between Georgia and Russia in August ended in a furor on Tuesday after a former Georgian diplomat testified that Georgian authorities were responsible for starting the conflict.Erosi Kitsmarishvili, Tbilisi’s former ambassador to Moscow, testified for three hours before he was shouted down by members of Parliament.A former confidant of President Mikheil Saakashvili, Mr. Kitsmarishvili said Georgian officials told him in April that they planned to start a war in Abkhazia, one of two breakaway regions at issue in the...
Picked up my copy of International Studies Perspectives yesterday to discover Abigail Ruane and Patrick James' article "The International Relations of Middle Earth: Learning from The Lord of the Rings" leading the "Pedagogy and the Discipline" Section. Just another example of why ISP is my favorite IR journal. I read the article with gusto. The piece "overviews how J.R.R. Tolkien's acclaimed triology is relevant to learing about IR and then presents a number of 'cuts' into using LOTR to inform IR teaching of both problem solving and critical theory." These include relating IR's three "Great...
The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10cThe Buccaneer Stops HereBarack Obama InterviewJohn McCain InterviewSarah Palin VideoFunny Election VideoWhy is it so hard to deal with the Pirate problem? The Daily Show is onto something here....
This post began as a response to the comments on Peter's recent post on pirates, but they got to be so long, and required hyperlinks, I decided to start a new thread. In his comment to that post, T. Greer asks what the pirates who hijacked the oiltanker Sirius Star were thinking, since they can't deal with the logistics involved in selling the cargo and were certainly likely to provoke the great powers (further) by targeting such a prize. Somali pirates want two things, as far as I can tell: 1) Money, which is why their strategies have been based on ransom demands - they don't care about...
Today, Jesse Singal has an excellent post challenging the role of conventional wisdom in making national security policy. All-too-often, he suggests, the terms of political debate and the potential policy options are locked in by a national security elite that infrequently finds its ideas contested, however dubious they might be.For example, what are we to make of the forthcoming increased attention devoted to Afghanistan and Pakistan -- even though many security analysts don't see much of a threat from the Taliban and al Qaeda forces located there? Singal references a provocative article by...