Driving in Russia: And also: Justin Gengler on... well... just go read. In a move sure (not) to keep NATO defense planners up at night, China and Belarus hold a joint exercise. Long-term US unemployment as a loss of weak ties? National Geographic reports on the wave...
The sailor (George Mendosa) and nurse (Greta Zimmer Friedman) depicted in this iconic photo snapped moments after the announcement that World War II had ended turned out to be complete strangers,...
I've been getting sporadic reports of problems opening the podcasts, e.g., of people clicking on them from the "podcasts" tab with no result, being unable to force a download to show up as an audio...
Check out the third episode of New Books in Science and Fantasy, in which I interview Meagan Spooner about Skylark.The summary:Lark Ainsley lives within a near-hermetically sealed city located in a...
Photo courtesy of Conflict CupcakeTo be fair, despite all the criticism, Foreign Policy's "Sex Issue" got a few things right. For an all-too rare moment, it put gender - er, sex - er, sexuality* - on the foreign policy agenda. Somehow (could it be the nude photo on the cover?!) the editors managed to get people excited - gripped even - by "women's issues." (What were the chances?)But enough snark. FP did well by including commentators from the Arab world like Mona El-Tahawy (OK one such commentator who is now based in New York) and both practitioners and scholars with expertise on global...
NOTE: The following was actually written before Dan Nexon posted a good piece on exactly the same essay. I’m not sure if that coincidence means anything, but here’s my take: ----------------------------------------- So I just read Orfeo Fioretos’ “Historical Institutionalism in International Relations” (IO 65/2, 2011). It’s very good - erudite and sophisticated, the kind of dense, abstract writing that makes me wonder if I can keep up in our uber tech-y scientistic field. In it (fn. 18), he defines ‘institution’ as “rules and norms that guide human action and interaction, whether formalized...
CBC - CP file photoThe Canadian International Council recently organized an interesting public event with Louise Arbour on her role in speaking "truth to power." The talk is available on line at Open Canada.org. (starts around 22min mark, after the introductions) and is constructed as a dialogue with Stephen Toope, President of the University of British Columbia and notable international law scholar.Madam Arbour is known for being outspoken on the ICC's prosecutorial strategy, shortcomings in the human rights regime, and advocacy on the Responsibility to Protect and especially the case of...
I have never really paid attention to shoes, my own or those of the opposite sex. But the past year has taught me that one form of footwear seems to be most important: boots. Boots on the ground vs no boots on the ground. Politicians making promises about no boots on the ground were all the rage last year at this time--that the US, Canada, and the rest of NATO would meet the language of non-occupation in the UN resolution governing the Libyan intervention by not putting any boots on the ground.What is lovely about this is that we now have essentially termed all ground-pounders (soldiers,...
Ron Hassner has long discussed forming an ISA section on Religion and IR. After attending the last ISA, talking to more people with work that touches on the subject, and seeing the continuing increase in papers that address religion and world politics, Ron is moving forward. If (and only if) you are an ISA member, please take a moment to sign the petition. We need a hundred qualified signatures.
Democratic peace theory is featured prominently in the latest issues of two different major IR journals. First, in International Studies Perspectives, Jameson Lee Ungerer tells us that the democratic peace exemplifies in three respects the Lakatosian ideal of a progressive research program, and provides an overview of the research agenda from 1970s to the present. He describes many (though not all) of the key causal arguments claiming to explain the democratic peace, concluding that: Of all the theories examines, two [are] the most progressive: the economic norms explanation, which proposed...
I'm sure there will be plenty of skeptics, but President Obama's speech this morning at the U.S. Holocaust Museum (see Charli's post below) and today's first meeting of the atrocity prevention board at the White House is a positive development. For the past twenty years -- since the beginning of the Bosnian War -- the U.S. has gradually increased the resources and institutional capacities for collecting and analyzing intelligence, preventing, and coordinating responses to mass atrocities. Yet, it is clear that even with these efforts, the U.S. government efforts have continued to be plagued...
This past weekend, an entertaining video clip was making the rounds on twitter and in the blogosphere. It is from a British daytime television show called "Golden Balls" and the academic discussion about it has been framed around 2 by 2 game theory:At the end of the show the contestants have to make one last decision over the final jackpot. They are each presented with two golden balls. One has “split” printed inside it and the other has “steal” printed inside it: If both contestants choose the split ball, the jackpot is split equally between them. If one contestant chooses the split ball...