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...
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...
At the risk of beating a dead terrorist horse, I want to cite W. Hays Parks (former Special Advisor to the Office of Legal Counsel on Law of War Issues at DoD, JAG and possible stand in for Clint Eastwood in that Grand Torino movie) on the Osama bin Laden assassination/murder/killing debate that has kind of been driving me nuts. In a response letter in the Washington Post, Parks writes: The May 2 lead story by Scott Wilson and Craig Whitlock on the death of Osama bin Laden was well written and reported. But on the continuation, the story referred to the deadly attack as an “assassination.”...
This is a guest post by Leslie Vinjamuri and Jack Snyder. Leslie is Co-Director of the Centre for the International Politics of Conflict, Rights and Justice and a Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She is also the co-chair of the London Transitional Justice Network. Jack is the Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Relations at Columbia UniversityLast Wednesday’s announcement that the International Criminal Court will seek arrest warrants against three senior officials in Libya...
Someone recently asked me whether, in the wake of the Richard Goldstone's qualifications of his infamous report, the UN was losing its credibility to issue fact-finding studies on humanitarian law violations. In my view, no matter how "credibly" a study is conducted, it is vulnerable to such critiques under the existing system - in which all humanitarian law reporting is partial, ad hoc and selective. That's because unlike other international regimes, the Geneva Conventions comes with no official monitoring body. At Foreign Affairs, I discuss this at more length and argue that it could and...
Strategist Edward Luttwak once observed that strategy has a paradoxical logic. The best way forward may be the longest way round, offence can be the best defence, and a seemingly victorious course pursued indefinitely will lead to over-reach. This is produced by the limitations of human strength, the resistance and friction of conflict, and the sheer dynamism and chaos of war.This dynamic surfaces in the insurgency in Afghanistan and the terrorist-hunting campaign in Pakistan. Consider two headlines following Bin Laden's death. In Afghanistan, killing Bin Laden may not dis-spirit the...
The Canard"All the fake news that's fit to print"Warning: This story is intended for mature audiences only.Washington, D.C. -- Racy pictures emerged today of noted international relations professor Dan Nexon. The academic, whose book The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009) recently won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, teaches at Georgetown University. The photos were taken while Nexon was a graduate student at Columbia University.In an exclusive...
In the Duck tradition of offering analysis of elections in countries where we do not reside or where we have no citizenship, I offer you this. During the last UK election, I remember remarking that there was no way that the Liberal Democrats would form a coalition with the Conservatives. This went against everything that I have always written about parties -- that they are policy-seekers as much as they are office-seekers, that parties don't jump across other parties to form coalitions with parties further away from them ideologically. People wrote about how the Liberals and Conservatives...
The killing of Osama bin Laden allows political leaders to further disentangle Iraq, Afghanistan and the whole war on terror concept; to wind down some operations and refocus others; to bring some stories to light and push others aside, to be forgotten. But how do those who served in these wars feel about this? In today’s New York Times Captain Shannon P. Meehan, a US veteran of the 2003 Iraq War, published a powerful statement of alienation on this matter. Meehan felt no closure on hearing of bin Laden’s death. It only brought a sense of distance and disconnection. It reminded him he had...
I am trying to find examples of humanitarian organizations that spoke out against the use of landmines by the Soviet Union during its invasion of Afghanistan from 1979-1989. Landmines were big as one of the weapons issues put up for debate in the late 1960s and early 1970s by the UN General Assembly. The first specific legislation against them was Additional Protocol II to the 1980 Convention on Conventional Weapons. (A regulatory treaty as opposed to a banning treaty.)Even if the original APII was pretty weak (it was amended in 1996 which greatly strengthened it) there is no question that...