This is a guest post by Sean Kay. Jeff Stacey’s introductory blog post at the Duck of Minerva gives important perspective showing that scholarly training helped him in government to frame issues and develop policy. Stacey suggests academic perspectives should inform...
As I sorta implied below, you don't need to agree with Erik's political views or his manner of expressing them to recognize that the President of the University of Rhode Island's statement is all...
The sixteenth Duck of Minerva podcast features Robert Farley of the University of Kentucky and Lawyers, Guns and Money.
I am currently at the Social Science Research Center in Berlin to present a paper on norm suppression. While here, I had the opportunity to learn more about some of the work being done by the Civil...
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 hyped. And while I'm sympathetic to the flurry of criticisms of FoxNews and others for hyping this, I'm also struck by how badly the administration has handled it all. The core of Obama's foreign policy has been to lighten America's global military footprint and to redirect away from Bush's flawed idea that we could "defeat" terrorism. In other words, the gist of Obama's foreign policy has been...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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:...
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,...