Robert provides Foreign Affairs a "snapshot" on the South Korean election -- which Park won today. An excerpt: For all the talk of the "pivot" to Asia in the United States, the idea is not widely discussed in South Korea. And South Koreans are not all that interested...
Good morning! Obama became the first sitting president to visit Myanmar/Burma yesterday. Plus, Amnesty International announced the release of political prisoners in the country yesterday, too. ...
Today,  Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a new report, Losing Humanity: The Case Against Killer Robots, becoming the most influential NGO to date to join an emerging call for a preemptive norm...
I'm at the end of a rather long trip to London, which is why I haven't been able to process or upload either Duck of Minerva or NBN podcasts yet. Nevertheless, I've got some good stuff coming on...
Hayes Brown discusses the Armenia-Azerbaijan state of play.Robert's been giving you the ground-level view of Pyongyang. Here's the satellite-eye view (via Kelsey Atherton).Henry Farrell on the European Central Bank's new program. How much is the economy, let alone the long-term unemployed, being hurt by the Republican-forced expiration of unemployment benefits? And why aren't we talking about it? At Howl at Pluto: an interesting debate among LFC, Kindred Winecoff, and Phil Arena about methods, models, and so forth.Lavie Tidhar explores "Heinlein and Racism," but not in the sense of textual...
In a recent article by Michal Ben-Josef Hirsch, Mohamed Sesay and myself, we explore broad-based claimed that transitional justice mechanisms are a necessary ingredient in successful peace processes. More specifically, we question the increasingly universal and rarely challenged assumption that truth and reconciliation commissions (TRCs) establish the truth and reconciliation necessary for lasting peace (the TRCs= truth and reconciliation formula). The truth is that we know very little about what truth and reconciliation commissions actually accomplish. What we do know is that they are the...
I am preparing to leave for a week to conduct participant-observation research at the The Third Meeting of States Parties (3MSP) to the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) in Oslo. As I prepare my remarks for the Youth Meeting, which I understand is supposed to be one of my more inspirational talks, I've been looking up old advocacy videos on YouTube and I came across this 2006 landmine campaign ad which I'd never seen before. It was apparently so controversial that it received almost no airtime in the United States.
Associated PressAlthough he doesn't get the European Phased Adapted Approach (EPAA) quite right, Mark Adomanis at Forbes makes the right point about the BMD portion of the Romney foreign-policy memo:I don’t think I’m being uncharitable, but if you read this paragraph and didn’t have any background knowledge about US missile defense in Eastern Europe you would come away with at least two very clear conclusions 1) Obama canceled a missile defense system planned for Poland and the Czech Republic2) Obama did not replace this planned missile defense system with anything elseConclusion 1) is...
2012 interview with Alexander Cooley, focused on Central Asian politics.
Nope, nothing here. Why? Google and its doodle. We need to say no more but to make sure you press on the various characters and realize that you need to go out and read Redshirts by John Scalzi.
There's been a lot of on-blog and off-blog chatter about reactions to Brian's most recent issue of The Canard, which some (though certainly not all) readers found offensive for its satirical use of stereotypes about the Democratic Republic of Congo. Brian wrote a rebuttal to his critics, which also triggered a negative reaction among segments of our readership. Other commenters weighed in to question whether posts in the style of The Onion ought to be held to the same standard as regular academic postsDespite the strong feelings on all sides, almost everyone conducted themselves in a civil...