Controversial feminist lawyer Catherine MacKinnon titled her latest book Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues. MacKinnon was, of course, referring to a feminist campaign to have women's rights recognized as human rights (see, e.g., the work of Charlotte...
On the basis of what empirical studies I could find about the effectiveness of international tribunals versus execution of mass-murderers, I debunk the following in my latest Current Intelligence...
Politics is always somewhat gross, but there seems to be an abundance of stories lately that make me queasy. In the tradition of saying to your friends, "You have got to try this; it's so...
Do the responses to the plight of Dorothy Parvaz, a journalist for Al Jazeera English who was detained in Syria and Iran for nearly 3 weeks, show continued resistance to female journalists pursuing...
It’s great to see a few of our elected representatives fighting back against the Democratic and Republican leadership’s attempt to renew the Patriot Act for another four years without amendment or even debate.  I highly recommend reading a few of the statements and speeches by the handful of Congress people brave enough to stand up against the leadership of both parties. Here is one of Republican Senator Rand Paul’s speeches from a few days ago. Here is John Tester. And here is Democratic Senator Tom Udall. They make many telling points about the Patriot Act’s gutting of the U.S....
Last week was full of bad news for those of us with c*jones:  One of my co-genders, who just happened to run the IMF, caught redhanded (or something) after assaulting a chambermaid; another, the very model of a manny-man rather than a girlie-man, fessing up to having sired a child with an employee over a decade ago. This week a one-time Presidential front-runner facing indictment for using campaign money to cover up news about his own love-child.Maybe I’ve just missed it, but it seems that most of the justifiably angry responses to these events have come from the distaff side:  Maureen Dowd,...
My Rules of War class this past Spring was an Honors version of the course, and to challenge my students I asked them to do original research on popular conceptions of international humanitarian law, an issue the International Committee of the Red Cross takes quite seriously. The assignment was to identify a concept in the rules of war, gain a firm understanding of the law, then identify a set of data on how people see those rules, and use content analytic or discourse analytic coding methods to study how far apart the representations of the law in text are from the rules as understood or...
The Western powers are in a rush to quickly confirm Christine Lagarde as the next MD, but there are some very good alternative choices outside of Europe who should be carefully considered. It may also be in the interest of the institution to at least appear more inclusive to the non-European parts of the world.  Here is a very rushed list of candidates whom I think would be viable in the eyes of the major stakeholders at the Fund (although each one has some flaws):1. Tharman Shanmugaratnam: I remember several years ago attending this Singaporean MP's meeting with local constituents. The...
Brian C. Rathbun now has 64 twitter followers!Co-authored by Stephanie Carvin and Ben O'LoughlinThis article is about the twitter community who post content about human security or security in a non–traditional context – not just tanks and strategy but natural disaster relief, post-conflict reconstruction, low level political violence, and all the law and politics surrounding these issues.So far as we can tell, this community seems to share the following characteristics: They are a mix of journalists, think tankers, academics, NGO staff, and students.While they frequently link to articles on...
How is it that time and time again we are persuaded to hang on for another year in Afghanistan with the mantra that counterinsurgency (a.k.a. COIN) will really work this time. While I certainly acknowledge the limited range of alternative options and oppose any peace agreement with the Taliban, I think that putting our faith in COIN time and time again is problematic... To understand why, perhaps a (not so brief) recap of how the discourse of COIN has mutated in Afghanistan would be helpful...From late 2003 to mid 2004, Robert Andrews, a CIA and DoD official and Donald Rumsfeld's head of...
What to make of it? Was it significant, or just more of the same? Of course it was significant -- it is the first time a U.S. president has publicly claimed the "1967 lines" as the basis for negotiations and it came after an apparent "angry" phone call from Netanyahu to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton demanding that the language be removed from the speech. It was clearly meant to send a signal. For the past five months, the Obama administration's reaction to the Arab spring has been a blend of soft rhetorical support with a wait-and-see approach. (This, by the way, was exactly the...