I have good friends a few miles north of here in Vermont who will be reeling from Hurricane Irene for months. One of my favorite places, Wilmington -- just south of Mount Snow ski resort -- was completely flooded and Route 9, the major road to the town (and all...
Last night PBS' POV program aired the Danish documentary film "Armadillo" (filmed 2009; released 2010) about a Danish-British Forward Operating Base in Helmand Province, Afghanistan.Although much of...
As American troops trickle back from Iraq and-eventually- Afghanistan, it seems like the perfect time to examine the lessons learned from the last decade of warfare. One of the policies requiring a...
Happy NATO Day! Okay, this is not an anniversary of anything NATO-esque. But heaps of posts a-twitter about NATO, its members and so on. So, some semi-random shots at some semi-random NATO...
Every year political scientists make a remarkable pilgrimage towards a large American city -- Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia. Against all odds they push upstream trying to make a name for themselves. There is only room enough for a dozen or so great names in political science, those whose names will one day adorn a plaque in a graduate student lounge. We speak their name in hushed tones -- Dahl, Skocpol, Waltz. But this does not deter thousands from arriving each year -- yearning, striving, networking. For graduate students political scientists call this 'socialization,' or learning...
As the forces of nature marshall for an attack on the east coast, I thought I'd call attention to Belfer's new blog, Power & Policy (via SW). If it becomes a breakout hit, we just might have to think our whole lack of institutional affiliation approach.(I thought of making some kind of lame "power" joke. Something along the lines of, "better check them out until they're just "policy." But then I thought better of it.)My parents got an advanced taste of devastation when a microburst completely blocked their summer house from the road by taking down a ton of trees. I got them out with my...
George Gallup - what have you started? The traditional methods for a state to know what overseas publics are thinking are changing. Instead of relying on your embassy staff’s alertness, your spies’ intelligence and the word of dissidents, we’re reaching the point where foreign policymakers can constantly monitor public opinion in countries in real-time. The digitization of social life around the world – uneven yes, but spreading – leaves ever-more traces of communications to be mined, analysed and acted upon. In a paper that Nick Anstead and I presented in Iceland this week, we called this...
Krugman:In short, there’s no reason at all to consider microeconomics the “real” economics and macroeconomics some kind of flaky impostor. Yes, micro is a lot more rigorous — but if it’s rigorously wrong, who cares?
Guest Post by Betcy Jose-Thota, Assistant Professor, University of Colorado-Denver. According to al Jazeera’s English language website, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Mahmoud Jibril, head of the National Transitional Council, met on Wednesday to discuss what a post-Gaddafi Libya would look like. After the meeting, Sarkozy told reporters that NATO would continue its military operation in Libya as long as Gaddafi remained a threat, stating: “We will continue acting within the mandate given to us by the UN to protect civilian forces.”If President Sarkozy was not misquoted, his...
I don't follow the news as closely as I should. I am not up on everyone's blogs. I don't check the Brookings Institution for every new report it issues. I am a lazy blogger. But I do seem to recall when this whole Libya thing started and didn't end successfully immediately that all kinds of "foreign policy analysts" came out of the woodwork to say it wouldn't work, that we were merely facilitating and prolonging a protracted civil war stalemate. We couldn't will the means that would be necessary. Dumbasses. I say that not because they got the prediction wrong, but rather that they tried to...
I am pretty much as ignorant about Libya as the next person, so let me just suggest a few generic lessons learned from other conflicts:Don't hold elections immediately. Everyone likes to do so to give the new folks legitimacy, but then it usually means empowering those who might not be the best folks to be empowered (see Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan). Think carefully about the guys with guns on both sides. Biggest mistake in early Iraq was firing the Iraqi military. Helped to create the insurgency. There has been a cottage industry in Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) and...
Does pastoralism -- the livelihood of semi-nomadic animal herders like the Maasai -- have a future in East Africa? In my concluding post on the famine in the Horn of Africa, it seems like a fair question to ask, no more controversial than whether Somalia should be divided into several countries (see here, here, here, and here for previous posts).I ask this because much of the commentary on the current crisis in the Horn of Africa suggests that "development" is the long-term solution for the region to ward off the potential for recurrent crisis. However, according to FEWS NET, parts of...