With less than a month left to nominate awards and guarantee voting rights, here’s where we stand: Nominees for Best Blog (Group): Abu Muqawama Arms Control Wonk Crooked Timber The Disorder of Things IPE at UNC Kings of War Nominees for Best Blog (Individual): Abu...
In 1963, JFK predicted that there would be as many 25 nuclear powers by the 1970s. Yet here we are, some 70 years later, and the number of states believed to possess nuclear weapons has grown from...
Topics covered: Process arguments about Libyan attack; Obama likes to kill Islamic terrorists; Energy independence is good, because... jobs; and Romney wants to start a massive trade war with China,...
Yes, it’s partisan, but it’s a somewhat useful deconstruction First, I included the above video to reference a point I tried to make earlier – that Romney flip-flopped so much in the first debate...
Here is part one where argued that America’s 8 most important allies are, in order: Canada, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, India, Indonesia, Israel, and South Korea. I argued for 3 quick-and-dirty reasons for that ranking, but I got some criticism on these in the first post, so here is some elaboration :1. National Security: Some places, like SA and Mexico, may not appeal much to Americans, but they are so obviously important, that abandonment would be hugely risky. So yes, SA is a nasty, reactionary ‘frenemy,’ not really an ally at all, but we’re stuck with it. A Saudi collapse would set off...
Professor Anne-Marie Slaughter’s talk in Parliament in London this week offered useful insights into how the Obama administration and foreign policy analysts around it are thinking about shaping international order. As Director of Policy Planning in that administration from 2009-11 she spoke from experience about the mechanisms being used to implement international change. While she touched on Syria, drone strikes and other newsworthy issues, her wide-ranging discussion was more important for the glimpses it gave of the theoretical assumptions underlying how US policymakers understand...
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 has seldom been presented in such detail in a mainstream publication. It is necessary if ugly reading, even if it is written in something approaching a triumphalist tone. The “kill list” involves U.S. targeting of Americans and others for drone death worldwide. This is being done without “due process of law.” Previously, due...
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 blogsphere. But that doesn't mean the we forlorn international-relations bloggers won't occasionally welcome our more wealthy cousins to the neighborhood, particularly when the blog in question involves a colleague.So go check The Mischiefs of Faction out. You know you want to.
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 finding. Every survey asks the question "aside from you, please list four scholars who have produced the most interesting scholarship in the past five years." In some respects, this question functions as a proxy for "most influential," as the list:Is very similar to the one for "four scholars who have had the greatest influence on the field of IR in the past 20 years"; and Contains a few people who,...
(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 several recent public statements she has directly addressed two of the Court's most significant challenges: the accusation that the Court's credibility suffers from a "pro-Western, anti-African" bias and the related issue of ensuring state cooperation and support, particularly in executing arrest warrants.The argument that the ICC has (so far) unjustly targeted only African states and individuals...
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...