I'll be mostly off the grid traveling for the next two and half weeks, and I want to thank readers for their many suggestions as to what I should take with me. I probably won't flesh out my entire reading list until I get to the airport Barnes and Noble, but I have...
Since I blogged about Journolist here in March 2009, I thought my followup (confessional) was worth mentioning now.
I use that term a lot, and I've been realizing that it's unclear to many people what that actually means. As Roland Paris pointed out years ago, the term means different things to different...
At the invitation of an old friend, my daughter and I will be traveling to Thailand the first two weeks of July, and I've been commanded to bring only vacation reading. It's been awhile since I did...
International Affairs – the (increasingly policy oriented) official journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (aka Chatham House) has published a “virtual” issue of articles on the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) dating back to 1968 and going up to the present. It includes one by Hedley Bull published in 1975 which (although very much dated) highlights the dilemmas of nuclear diplomacy during the period of detente and when India shocked the world by conducting a nuclear explosion in 1974 and China re-emerged as a major player on the world stage.Not exactly beach-y kind of summer...
I am happily in receipt of a letter from University of Massachusetts' Chancellor Holub informing me that I have been awarded tenure. Of course you know what this means: the days of keeping my outside-the-box ideas to myself are gone like the Twelve Colonies. Yep, I just cannot wait to write something controversial or unpopular using my newly acquired academic freedom.
So, I'm in Brussels this morning meeting with various NATO folks on how they plan to develop a strategy for rebuilding public support for Afghanistan and for the future expeditionary operations outlined in the the Albright Experts Group report and someone comes in with a copy of Rolling Stone. Quite frankly, that's not something I thought I'd ever see -- Rolling Stone had the entire place buzzing....My first reaction: This can not end well for McChrystal. He has a lot of support here, but this crossed so many lines-- civil-military relations, leadership judgment, command authority, the...
Daniel Drezner has expounded on his seminal "Zombies and IR" blog postwith a full spread on the topic in the July/August Foreign Policy:The specter of an uprising of reanimated corpses... poses a significant challenge to interpreters of international relations and the theories they use to understand the world. If the dead begin to rise from the grave and attack the living, what thinking would -- or should -- guide the human response? How would all those theories hold up under the pressure of a zombie assault? When should humans decide that hiding and hoarding is the right idea?What follows...
It is increasingly becoming evident that the venerable New York Times was played by the Pentagon last week. The announcement by a Pultizer Prize winning journalist that Afghanistan may have up to a trillion dollars worth of mineral resources under its war torn soil made a huge buzz. But this bit of "news" planted by the Pentagon was not very new at all (in fact, as the NY Times article notes even the Soviets knew about some of this) and the timing of the announcement seems very suspicious given the dismal shape of the US-led offensive in the southern provinces. Nevertheless, the news has...
I’m traveling in Israel this week on an academic study tour with a mix of 15 political scientists, economists, and historians. It’s a grueling schedule – 14 to 16 hours of sessions per day – meeting with Israelis, Israeli –Arabs, and Palestinians. I finally have a short break in the schedule so this is the first of several posts. I’ll post some thoughts on Gaza later, but I’ll start with the West Bank. On Tuesday, we went to Ramallah and met with Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad to talk about state building in the West Bank. Fayyad introduced his two-year plan for Palestinian...
Other duties have prevented me from posting as much as I'd like to for the past couple of months, but now that the summer is really upon us I am going to try to make more regular appearances. I received a query from a reader that seemed quite appropriate for the Methodology411, so here we go:Mada asks: "Is there a feminist methodology? And if so, what does it consist of?"By way of kick-starting a discussion, I reply: You ask a deceptively complicated question, one that feminist scholars have been wrestling with for a long time. Part of the complexity stems from the fact that there are many...
For those of you who are international law junkies (– and really, who isn’t?) ASIL has a very interesting blog on the ICC Review Conference that took place over the last two weeks in Kampala, Uganda. David Scheffer, a notable scholar on both the ICC and international criminal justice, has a really interesting post summarizing most of the decisions that were made.Of course one of the most interesting developments is, of course, the crime of aggression. However, what I find to be more interesting is the expansion of the prohibition of weapons banned in international armed conflict (including...