We're welcoming a couple of new guest bloggers to Duck. Jay Ulfelder, who blogs at Dart Throwing Chimps, is a political scientist who does excellent work forecasting regime survival and change, democratization, and violent conflict. And Erica Chenoweth from Wesleyan...
Yesterday the FBI arrested a Massachusetts man, who has been subsequently charged with a number of crimes related to terrorism. [1] This is the latest in a string of plots that the U.S. has...
Political scientists like other political scientists with a Ph.D. degree from a good school. Those who go to Harvard or Yale or Berkeley are ‘well-trained.’ This means that they have successfully...
While the US and UK continue to debate the ways that women impact cohesion and combat effectiveness, effective immediately, the Australian military will allow women to participate in combat roles....
Political scientists love citations, or, more accurately, to be cited. Actually compiling citations is a tremendously tedious chore that political scientists leave to the very end of any paper, one marked by a bitter struggle with Endnote. Citations are the best marker political scientists have of success. As political scientists come in both male and female varieties, they cannot simply measure penises. And even if all political scientists were male, there would not be, to use political science parlance, enough “variation” in such a measure to properly differentiate between them. What is...
In addition to filling an open faculty line in international relations (IR), I was hired in 1991 by the University of Louisville with the idea that I would eventually direct the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. The World Order award was then one of four Grawemeyer Awards and at the time I was hired, I knew virtually nothing about any of them. The prize was worth $150,000, making it the largest award in Political Science. Nonetheless, it was not especially well-known even within the discipline, nor much publicized outside of it, though the earliest prizes were awarded to...
Not to make light of ongoing troubles in the Horn of Africa and beyond, but... well.If you want to go beyond the five A's, click here.
The banner image of the ICRtoP (International Coalition for the Responsibility to Protect) website features a photo of seven boys under the protective gaze of a UN peacekeeper as he carries his bottled water, while other soldiers patrol ahead on the pathway that they all share together. From a structural perspective, the image is compelling because it situates the viewer as the rear-guard of the mission.Unfortunately, there is absolutely no context provided for this image on the ICRtoP website -- not even a photo credit [there is a photocredit on the "contact us" page]. Nevertheless, there...
Photo courtesy of Etsy. The perfect lawfare key chain!Over at the Lawfare blog, Jack Goldsmith recently offered up a "mea culpa" on his changing views of the concept and practice of lawfare. I don't want to address the specifics of that post, but this and the Libya situation got me thinking again that a non-pejorative conceptualization of lawfare needs to be put forward. Particularly in the context of the International Criminal Court. Stay tuned. But for now...Charles Dunlap defends that his original conception of lawfare was meant to be a neutral one. But it has since been co-opted by...
Debate over NATO's military intervention in the Libyan civil war has reinvigorated discussion among observers of international relations on the merits (or demerits) of the United Nations's Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine. You can find links to important entries in the current debate at the end of this post, but I'm going to react here to one part of it. In a rejoinder to her critics, including IR student and Slouching Towards Columbia blogger Dan Trombly, Princeton University's Anne-Marie Slaughter casts R2P as an instrument for positive change in the international system, a wrench...
The catastrophes of Rwanda and Bosnia led to a debate in the 1990s about the warning-response gap. Conflict prevention and early warning systems did not seem up to scratch. Third parties intervened too late, if at all. Spending was skewed towards mitigating the effects of conflicts, not on stopping them happen in the first place. The spread of satellite television brought conflicts into more immediate public vision. It was feared this created a CNN effect whereby policymakers were forced into military intervention for humanitarian causes to satisfy a more globally-aware public opinion. But...
Now that Blood and Chrome appears to be at risk of demotion from upcoming TV show to series of webisodes (!) BSG fans among the readership can at least geek out on this documentary. (Because most of us have so little better to do with the start of the term and all.)