I’ve been getting surprisingly decent feedback on these posts. Some of my colleagues at work (who know more about democracy and elections than I do) have said that they felt that they were not...
Is this the end of the grand Eurozone experiment? I have to admit that I've had a general feeling for the past couple of months that the Germans would, in the end, cough up a bail-out package for...
I was alerted this morning to the death of Professor Fred Halliday. Halliday, who specialized in the Middle East and was very much a legend around the London School of Economics. I was fortunate...
Sorry I've been out of the loop for a month or so -- I volunteered to lead a search committee for the head of a local organization and I'm just now catching my breath. (Note to self: Volunteering is really hard work and takes a ton of time...)So, I opened the New York Times this morning and notice that Africa's largest country may be on the brink of splitting apart after the country's presidential elections earlier this month. The rivals, Omar Bashir and Salva Kiir (indicted war criminal and former rebel leader respectively -- great choices) have completely consolidated their control --...
I finally saw Men Who Stare at Goats this weekend. A significant number of reviews from last year when it came out reference the epigram to the film, "More of this stuff is true than you think." However in my mind, the most important quote in the film is the one above. If you try to read this film through any other lens - pacifism, spy culture, truth v. fiction re. the paranormal - it doesn't work very well. That's why a lot of reviewers either read the film as inept satire or as failed story-telling. But they don't look closely at the two central questions driving the story: what...
Recently, while discussing the war in Afghanistan with a conflict studies program in the mid-west, I had a rather odd debate with a leftist professor who was devil's advocating what he claimed was a "neo-conservative" position (based on some of his recent interaction with naval officers and RAND researchers).His main argument revived the "stabbed in the back" hypothesis from the Vietnam era. The argument essentially posits that counter-insurgency is a cumulative body of knowledge first pioneered by the Britons. According to this position, Americans have been remarkably successful at applying...
In every episode of the classic 1960s television series "The Prisoner," Number 6 and Number 2 had this exchange: Number 6: Where am I?Number 2: In the Village.Number 6: What do you want?Number 2: We want information.Number 6: Whose side are you on?Number 2: That would be telling. We want information... information... information.Number 6: You won't get it.The lack of information is a problem widely recognized by international relations scholars.Face it, we study a field marked by secrecy and imprecision. The central unit of analysis is the state, with interests (or motives) that are...
Kevin Jon Heller at Opinio Juris says NGO Monitor should practice what it preaches when it comes to transparency about donations from government funders. The dialogue in comments on this and older threads is illuminating and raises some interesting questions about the accountability of the NGO sector. Like Heller, I would like to see greater transparency from both Human Rights Watch and NGO Monitor.I think it's a shame that NGO Monitor is so policitized by its emphasis on Israel because the general argument it makes is quite cogent: who watches the watchers? The NGO sector of global civil...
I’m planning on writing a larger post on the topic after the Second Election Debate tonight – particularly since it is going to be about UK Foreign policy (and, in theory, more or less related to the topics of this blog...)In the mean time if you haven’t been paying attention, the election has basically exploded into interestingness in the last week. The First (ever) Leader’s Debate basically jump-started the election in a way that I (and I suspect most people) never anticipated. Tonight’s debate is now pretty much mandatory watching. The short version is that the third party candidate,...
[Cross-posted at Signal/Noise]In the latest issue of WIRED, Clive Thompson pens a great piece which echoes a sentiment I've touched on before: in a data-driven world it is critical that all citizens have at least a basic literacy in statistics (really, research methodology broadly, but I'll take what I can get).Now and in the future, we will have unprecedented access to voluminous amounts of data. The analysis of this data and the conclusions drawn from it will have a major impact on public policy, business, and personal decisions. The net effect of this could go either way--it can usher in...
A bunch of "big thinkers" sat down at Harvard last week to debate this question. You can watch their videos here. Some of the "problems" put forth were simply timely empirical issues with important normative content, like how to close the gender gap in pay equity, or reduce the "skills gap" between Blacks and Whites, or how to understand the relationship between ethnic diversity and civil war. But some were more wide-ranging: What is the biggest falsehood perpetuated in the social sciences today? How and why does the "social" become "biological"? If we know that individuals are susceptible...