The latest issue of International Studies Perspectives includes a forum on open access.I bet you can guess where this is headed.Â
Irony’s Bucket List: Academic Journal Section
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Month: August 2012
Walt sings the praises of a liberal education
Steve Walt opines that "would-be foreign policy wonks" should basically get a classical liberal-arts education, and he uses a traditional justification for this: "In world that is both diverse and...
Friday Morning Linkage
Indonesia's foreign minister warns of "deeper divisions" between China and ASEAN over South China Sea.Taylor Favrel and Dennis J. Blasko assess the new PLA South China Sea garrison  Mark Hibbs...
Podcast No. 6 – The Brain-Melt Episode
PTJ and Dan discuss academic administration and the foreign-policy rhetoric of the 2012 campaign.
More Month: August 2012 Posts
Thursday Morning Linakge
Daniel Drezner unloads on Jennifer Rubin. Bottom line: better hacks, please!Thomas Rid argues against much of our current discourse on cyberwar. Lincoln Mitchell writes that: "Georgia's government has lost its identity as one led by bright-eyed democrats seeking to build a European style democracy deep in the heart of what used to be the Soviet Union. Instead, the government of President Mikheil Saakashvili has become another semi-authoritarian regime relying upon selectively enforced and crafted laws, media repression and harassment and intimidation of political opponents in order to hold...
The Olympics Make You Care Less About Milwaukee
When Usain competes, U.S. aid plummets. At Andrew Sullivan's Daily Beast, Patrick Appel offers a few hypotheses about why Americans seem to care less about the killing of Sikhs than the killing of moviegoers, including the observation that the timing of the Milwaukee shootings so soon after the Batman massacre have left many pundits unwilling to talk further about gun control for fear of sounding redundant. Appel also hypothesizes that low levels of media coverage may be due to the Aurora killings haven taken place on a slow news day while the Milwaukee killings happened during the Olympics....
Emerging Technologies, Material and Social
Recording Casualties and the Protection of Civilians from Oxford Research Group (ORG) on Vimeo. As the lone social scientist in a room of lawyers, philosophers and technicians last week, I was struck by a couple of things. One was the disconnect between descriptive and normative ethics, or rather questions of is versus ought. Everyone was speaking about either norms and rules, but whereas the lawyers treated existing norms and rules as social facts the philosophers treated them as questions of ethics that could and should be altered if necessary on their ethical merit. Another was the...
Wednesday Afternoon Video
Do Battle Droids Dream of Electric Medals?
 One of the more interesting issues raised informally during the time I spent at the Lincoln Center's Emerging Technologies Workshop was the relative likelihood of developments in lethal autonomous robotics leading to fully autonomous armies: that is, eliminating the human presence from battle-spaces altogether. The general consensus is that this is unlikely, with which I am not claiming to disagree. But what fascinated me was a particular argument to this effect: that lethal robots would never be able to replace human beings as sacrifices in the name of the nation. Two constitutive...
Wednesday Morning Linkage
More politics of Batman, this time with special Schmitt sauce. Well, yeah, superheroes are kind of about who gets to decide the exception.... and their answers are often fascist. Wasn't that a major point of Watchmen?Thomas Wright: the Republican Rejection of UNCLOS was a Very Bad Thing. Alexander Cooley: what Central Asia tells us about a post-hegemonic world. Against adverb police. Two sides of the same COIN?Joseph Young discusses extremely extreme extremists. Well, not really. More like what makes someone an extremist. But the post-pic is of Doritos. So score!Chinese urban geography via...
Field Reports
I spent last week doing "field research" - that is, participant-observation in one of the several communities of practice whose work I'm following as part of my new book project on global norm development. In this case, the norm in question is governance over developments in lethal autonomous robotics, and the community of practice is individuals loosely associated with the Consortium on Emerging Technologies, Military Operations and National Security. CETMONS is an epistemic network comprised of six ethics centers whose Autonomous Weapons Thrust Group collaboratively published an important...
Premature Friday Nerd Blogging
 Too good to wait (spoilers for Dark Knight Rises):