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 essay, responding to effects-based claims on both sides of the debate...
Last week was full of bad news for those of us with c*jones: Â One of my co-genders, who just happened to run the IMF, caught redhanded (or something) after assaulting a chambermaid; another, the...
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...
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...
(Written with Alister Miskimmon) Following the death of Osama bin Laden, political pressure is mounting for an early scaling down of British military troops presence in Afghanistan ahead of David Cameron’s deadline of 2014 for the end of Britain’s combat mission. With this in mind the British defence establishment is trying to understand their role in Afghanistan since 2001. Much of this soul-searching has focused on trying to explain why British forces have not been able to pacify sections of the Afghan population. Their explanation is that they have not been able to project the right...
Blogger has finally started to restore posts, but it doesn't look like everything is back yet. Meanwhile, my partner's off to Kazakhstan, I've got 38 seminar papers and 16 short essays to grade, and my daughter's become obsessed with Naruto. So, in lieu of posting anything substantive:Rob Farley has some thoughts on the air campaign in Libya;PM's thoughts on qualitative and quantitative methods deserves more commentary from our academic readers;Al Jazeera chronicles how Saudia Arabia's new protectorate, the Bahrain's government, is using its Arab Spring crackdown to systematically destroy...
The folks at The Monkey Cage win blogger of the year. Well done!
Daniel Drezner takes another stab at the Brooks-Krugman-Winecoff-Drezner-Farrell dustup. I merely wish to make a few points:Most voters are information specialists; they do not tend to specialize in the intricacies of policy debates. Thus, they are unlikely to know, for example, the actual distributional implications of the Bush-era tax cuts or understand the details of Iraq.Many of the more engaged voters are partisans; they process information through the cues they receive from party spokespersons. This is why, for example, a conservative health-care plan rapidly morphed into radical...
With the politics of "budget crisis" dominating the political discourse, what does a Tea Party-dominated Republican foreign and defense policy look like? Not good. Gutting diplomacy and development and leaving defense spending largely uncut means American power becomes more blunt and unwieldy. I've written up my take in the current issue of Current Intelligence. Here's a portion: Republican Congressional leaders have pledged that nothing is off the table... Except of course, it turns out the Republicans aren’t really all that serious about cutting defense spending. With nearly 30 million...
Qualitative scholars in political science are used to thinking of themselves as under threat from quantitative researchers. Yet qualitative scholars' responses to quantitative "imperialism" suggest that they misunderstand the nature of that threat. The increasing flow of data, the growing availability of computing power and easy-to-use software, and the relative ease of training new quantitative researchers make the position of qualitative scholars more precarious than they realize. Consequently, qualitative and multi-method researchers must not only stress the value of methodological...
A running theme around the office lately has been the deeply problematic character of causal mechanisms that international-relations scholars take for granted. For example, apparently simple claims about domestic institutions and credible commitments often require all sorts of heroic assumptions about public attention to policy processes, the degree of actual restraint institutions impose upon executives, and so on. They also have almost nothing to do with the way that policymakers assess the credibility of their counterparts. A related set of issues revolve around embedded neoliberal...
Stacie Goddard and Tom Burke from Wellesley created this "typical meeting between a student and faculty member at the Political Science Department of Wellesley College" for their annual Political Science majors' dinner. Well done.