Building on Dan's observation this past week, Theo McLauchlin is a PhD student at McGill University offers us some insights on the role of the military in the various Arab revolutions we're witnessing. He works in the area of military defections and civil wars.Which...
Suspected Mercenaries in LibyaI really do more things than tweeting, but this morning I got up to find that the ICRC had sent out a message that simply stated the title of the Convention of the OAU...
Professor Michael Gross left a lengthy response at Current Intelligence to my remarks about his characterization of asymmetric war. I'm afraid he seems displeased with me:Far superior to faint...
Whether or not significant elements of the military defect continues to be the key factor in the Revolutions 2011.(Photo: AP)
My University's relationship with the neighborhood's oligarchy really, really sucks.Although our neighbors have some legitimate grievances, I find it hard to sympathize with the Advisory Neighborhood Commission's  particular brand of crazy. According to the City Paper:Basically, the neighbors want to seal all evidence of student presence either on M Street or inside the campus gates, protecting quiet streets from noise and unsightly student rentals. The problems of cacophony and crowding have gotten intolerable, they say, as a result of Georgetown's failure to keep a lid on its student...
As reports circulate that the vast majority of Libya is in the hands of the opposition, Gaddafi blames al-Qaeda and drug-addled youth for the revolution:Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan leader, has said in a speech on Libyan state television that al-Qaeda is responsible for the uprising in Libya."It is obvious now that this issue is run by al-Qaeda," he said, speaking by phone from un unspecified location.He said that the protesters were young people who were being manipulated by al-Qaeda, and that many were doing so under the influence of drugs."No one above the age of 20 would actually take...
 Many scholars consider "prediction" to be the goal of social science. They deploy fancy statistical techniques to create complex models that, if they're really good, reach the Olympian heights of 47% accuracy rates.Then there's the Onion, who makes all of those technowizards with their "R" and their "LaTeX" look like a bunch of coin flippers. Consider the its scarily accurate 17 January 2001 headline, "Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over'".So when I read its 2004 article, "National Museum Of The Middle Class Opens In Schaumburg, IL", I laugh and I cry,...
Wednesday, February 23rd was certainly one of the stranger days of American politics.Best I can tell, we decided that all those darn Middle Easterners were getting too much attention with their popular protests bringing down regimes, civil wars between pro-democracy and autocratic forces, and all that, so the US was all like, "dude, better turn on the crazy and get some freaking attention!!"At least, that's the best explanation I've got.
My review essay on the protection of civilians is out in Foreign Affairs. I discuss two books - Michael Gross' Moral Dilemmas of Modern War, and Stephen Rockel and Rick Halpern's edited volume Collateral Damage. All these authors clearly care deeply about protecting civilians in armed conflicts, and worry in different ways that the existing laws of war are flawed. I have somewhat more faith, particularly in the ability of global civil society organizations to build upon these foundations in order to fill the existing gaps; in fact, as I argue, this process is already underway: In Moral...
Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi's second son and purported successor, Saif Al-Islam Alqadhafi fueled the protests the other night with his disjointed speech. The irony of Saif's complicity in all of this is that he wrote his Ph.D. dissertation under David Held at London School of Economics titled: "The Role of Civil Society in the Democratisation of Global Governance Institutions." From the Abstract: This dissertation analyses the problem of how to create more just and democratic global governing institutions, exploring the approach of a more formal system of collective decision-making by...
If you've been paying any attention to the news, you undoubtedly know that Libya is in the midst of a revolution. The Libyan government understands that all too well; hence, the increasing force deployed against opponents of the regime. Tripoli can't be pleased that some of its military and its diplomatic corp are defecting from the regime.Anne Applebaum has written a column comparing the revolutions to 1848. That's not a terrible comparison, insofar as we're looking at a combination of transnational networking and demonstration effects triggering modular uprisings in different countries....