This video from Africa for Norway provides a humorous way to think about foreign aid: I suppose there is a good chance readers have already seen the video -- more than 1.5 million people have viewed it on youtube.
Africa for Norway
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Month: November 2012
Podcast No. 14 – Interview with Michael J. Tierney
The fourteenth Duck of Minerva podcast features Michael J. Tierney.
Friday Morning Linkage
Jeffrey Lewis analyzes evidence that Burma seeks nuclear weapons. Juan Cole discusses shifting positions on the status of Palestine at the UN. And some good pre-vote analysis from Erik Voeten. ...
The Susan Rice Fiasco
I'm not sure the Obama administration could have handled this any worse. We live in a highly politicized world and somehow the Obama administration is "shocked, shocked" that this issue is being...
More Month: November 2012 Posts
The International Relations Discipline and the Rise of Asia
A few months ago, I was commissioned by the International Relations and Security Network of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology to provide a brief write-up on how Asia’s rise will impact the formal discipline of international relations (IR) within political science. I didn’t get a chance to put it up earlier, and inevitably, the brief means sweeping judgments in just a few pages, but I think it’s a reasonable effort. Here is the version on their website; below it is reprinted: “It is widely understood that international relations (IR) relies on modern (post-Columbus) and North Atlantic...
Of Sultans and Soap Operas
This is a guest post by Peter S. Henne. Peter is a doctoral candidate at Georgetown University. He formerly worked as a national security consultant. His research focuses on terrorism and religious conflict; he has also written on the role of faith in US foreign policy. During 2012-2013 he will be a fellow at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia. Last December, I was in Doha to attend the UN's Alliance of Civilizations conference. While fighting off jet lag in my apartment--the 13 hour flight is a killer--I saw a commercial for 'Hareem al Sultan' (the Arabic version of the...
Wednesday Night Linkage
Spent the morning recording a podcast. Except that we just chatted and never got around to the actual interview. Then it was off to job talks and child chauffeuring.... Tom Z. Collina doesn't like the idea of a BMD system for the US east coast. Dan Drezner says that China is involved in a security dilemma with ASEAN. I'm not so sure: it looks to me like Beijing is being expansionist and that's provoking its neighbors. Noorjahan Akbar reports on civil-society building in Afghanistan. Australia will abstain on the Palestine recognition vote at the UN. Robert McMillan and Spencer Ackerman...
A Semi-Canadian Perspective on the Academic-Policy Divide Debate
The semi-annual policy/academic divide debate is back thanks to discussions about PhDs for the policy world (Drezner v. Foust) and Galluci's piece on the debate, with Drezner's response. I would guess that this event is tied to a lunar calendar as it seems to occur often but not always just after Thanksgiving. Anyhow, I posted my views on this at Canadian International Council--the folks seeking to be the Great White North version of Foreign Policy.com. My argument parallels Dan's response: that academics are increasingly engaging the policy world especially through web 2.o (so the tweets...
“Dangerous Neighborhood:” Operation ‘Defensive Pillar’ and its Interpreters
This is a guest post by Daniel J. Levine (University of Alabama) and Daniel Bertrand Monk (Colgate University). Daniel J. Levine is author of Recovering International Relations: The Promise of Sustainable Critique. Daniel Bertrand Monk is the co-editor, with Jacob Mundy, of the forthcoming: The Post-Conflict Environment: Intervention and Critique (University of Michigan, 2013). The authors’ names for this essay have been listed alphabetically. tl;dr notice: ~2600 words. "As Ambassador Gillerman has said many times on our show, ‘Israel lives in a dangerous neighborhood." -- Fox News, 16...
Parsing the DOD’s Directive on Autonomous Weapons
Yes. Only two days after Human Rights Watch launched its "preemptive call" to ban the development and deployment of such systems, the US Defense Department doubled down with a document (shorter version here) that claims: "Autonomous and semi-autonomous weapons systems shall be designed to allow commanders and operators to exercise appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force." Comforting? On the surface this sounds like a nod to the idea that human judgment is crucial in lethal targeting decisions in war and cannot be outsourced to machines. Spencer Ackerman seems to think so:...
2013 Grawemeyer Award Winner
Congratulations to Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan for winning the 2013 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World. As readers may recall, Chenoweth is a Duck of Minerva guest blogger. Chenoweth and Stephan won the $100,000 prize for their 2011 book, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (Columbia University Press). This is a succinct description from the press website: Combining statistical analysis with case studies of specific countries and territories, Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan detail the factors enabling such campaigns to succeed and,...
Tuesday Morning Linkage
Nominations (and voting registrations) are really starting to come in. I've updated the most recent post to reflect yesterday's additions. Linkage: Leslie Dwyer: "After Aceh's Peace." Foreign People Policy is out with its "Top 100 Global Policy Celebs Thinkers" list, so I suppose we now have to slavishly dissect it. Or, we could read Audrey Waters' "top 100 reasons why I hate lists" (which isn't super-relevant, but whatever...) BLTN: The Disorder of Things had a symposium on open-access journals in the social sciences. Pablo K., Colin Wight, David Mainwaring, Nivi Manchanda, Nathan Coombs,...