The NY Times’ recent article on Obama’s “kill list” of American citizens and others suspected--not convicted--of terrorism includes much disturbing information on what our government is doing in our names. The entire “kill list” process and Obama’s central role in it...
Let's face it: academic American politics blogs get all the love. Not only do they have lots of pretty graphs, but they also make authoritative pronouncements about issues central to the political...
The new TRIP survey is out. While the overall findings don't hold many surprises, there are some nuggets of interest. We'll have more to say later, but for now I want to call out a particular...
(Originally posted at Justice in Conflict)Photo: BBCFatou Bensouda, incoming Chief Prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, has put threatening war criminals and defiant states on notice. In...
In Spring of 2006, I was nearing the end of data collection on my investigation into the human rights of children born of rape and exploitation in conflict zones, and I presented my preliminary findings on the topic atUniversity of Pittsburgh’s Research in International Politics (RIP) monthly brown-bag. In such circles, heavily dominated by empirical approaches, one does not present normative theory (that is, value-laden arguments about how the world should look) or policy-oriented sets of recommendations about particular problems. Rather, one identifies empirical puzzles about the world and...
Seven years ago today, 28 May 2005, is the day that this blog was, in an important sense, born. The previous day the day Dan officially posted the announcement that The Duck of Minerva was henceforth a collective enterprise (he said "collaborative endeavor," but whatever), and on the 28th, Bill Petti and I started weighing in with posts of our own: Bill on nuclear (non-)proliferation, and me -- in what should have been an early signal that I wasn't exactly going to be doing mainstream IR as my regular schtick here -- on "momentum" and why it's a poor metaphor for events in social life, even...
You don't understand the power of offensive realism. From Steve Coll's Private Empire:Vice President Cheney seemed particularly interested in China's vulnerability to U.S. naval power. His experience of the global oil market while running Halliburton had left him with a deep understanding of oil's fungible nature. But his thinking about national security was influenced, too, by historical narratives about the rise and fall of great powers, and particularly the history of control of the sas, which had been critical to Great Britain and the United States, in succession, as a means to ensure...
Here is an answer to Jon Western’s good question. Here is Steve Walt saying nice things about Ron Paul, and Layne has a nice recent piece in the National Interest, and another at ISQ, about looming US retrenchment. Earlier I argued that I think lots of people in IR now both expect and want some measure of US pullback. The argument is pretty well-known by now – empirically, the US is doing more than it can afford, like the Iraq war (trillion dollar deficits and ‘overstretch’); normatively, we are violating far too many of our liberal values against a comparatively minor terrorist threat...
This is a cross-post from my solo blog, Dart-Throwing Chimp.A few days ago, Sean Langberg blogged about a subject that's long been a pet peeve of mine: how we classify countries when we try to talk about the international system, and the labels we apply to the resulting groups. I thought I'd take the cue to air my grievances on the topic and make a couple of simple suggestions.Taxonomies require organizing principles, and the kernel of the classification system Americans usually use in international politics comes from modernization theory. Modernization theory's core idea is...
I'd write a lengthy comment on this, but with my new administrative responsibilities, I have a full day of meetings on liberal arts assessment and impact -- oh, and some kind of silly discussion on the instrumentalization of education and the vocational turn. Whatever. I'll just say that this should take care of my presentation at new faculty orientation next month.... From Department of Omnishambles: Karl Marx's end of year department assessment:ht: Sherrill Stroschein
With Obama's proposed $487bn cuts in defense spending over the next ten years and the potential for another $500bn in cuts through sequestration set to kick in next January if Republicans and Democrats fail to reach the grand bargain compromise on the budget, lots of folks are now harping about the looming threat to American national security if the cuts take hold. Earlier this month, General Joseph F. Dunford Jr., assistant commandant, U.S. Marine Corps concluded that: “We have a tendency to view sequestration as a budget issue, but it’s really not a budget issue. It’s a re-ordering of our...