Charli’s posts on Human Rights Watch and Autonomous Weapons got me thinking: should we really expect human rights international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to influence weapons systems? On the whole, human rights NGOs are a pretty powerless lot: NGOs don’t...
From Her Majesty's Explorer.My attempts to get Dan Drezner an ignoble have failed.Steve Saideman will be pleased that Sara Silverman has jumped on the voter fraud fraud bandwagon (NSFW). Frank...
So North Korea has issued a "Gangnam Style" video to mock a South Korean presidential candidate, Park Guen Hye, from the ruling conservative party. According to Malaysia's The Sun Daily:"The parody,...
Mass protests against militias in Benghazi demonstrate the power of mobilization-triggers and the weakness of movements that lack proper infrastructure. Marc Lynch analyzes Newsweek's #muslimrage...
The Canard “All the fake news that’s fit to print” --Los Angeles Part-time political scientist and blogging provocateur Brian Rathbun yesterday checked himself into a rehabilitation center for addiction to science fiction. Although Rathbun’s public face was as an anti-nerd, he secretly had succumbed to the vice of Battlestar Galactica, which he watched in its entirety over the last few weeks. Reached for comment, Rathbun simply said, “I haven’t left my room in weeks. I watched over eighty episodes of BSG. Oh my god, I even know the acronym. There is a bogey on my dradis! There is a bogey on...
<img src="https://lh4.ggpht.com/-kdQcW4Vl7-k/T1A4B7ds90I/AAAAAAAAAGc/qah90Do3fTk/videoc8c44ca00ba6%25255B13%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" style="border-style: none" galleryimg="no" onload="var downlevelDiv = document.getElementById('1f164c0c-2f86-4021-9047-76be574cf4fc'); downlevelDiv.innerHTML = "";" alt="" />Here’s the last one if you haven’t seen it yet So it looks like the GOP debating season is over. Wow. I don’t study American politics, but I can’t remember a marathon run of debates like that ever before. (Can anyone speak to that point,...
ReutersMarc Lynch's policy brief for the Center for a New American Security, titled "Pressure Not War:" A Pragmatic and Principled Policy Towards Syria" raises a provocative possibility for ICC judicial intervention. Lynch argues that pressure should be put on Assad and his officials to either go into exile to allow for a political transition or risk facing war crimes charges at the ICC. In his own words:"To date, Syrian officials have not been referred to the ICC, in order to keep alive the prospect of a negotiated transition. Asad must have an exit strategy, by this thinking, or else he...
via. H/T Catia Cecilia Confortini. With apologies to Ryan Gosling and Danielle Henderson.
Antoine Bousquet has a fascinating post at Disorder of Things on developments in neuroscience and how they are being used by militaries to 1) enhance their own soldiers and 2) degrade the abilities of their opponents. The post is in response to a report by The Royal Society on Neuroscience, Conflict and Security which outlines these developments, speculates on the future and the ethical implications of these developments.As Bousquet notes, it’s some pretty hairy stuff:Yet perhaps the most potentially consequential developments will be found in the area of neural interfacing and its efforts...
Here's something funny: I've been so mired in studying how international norms emerge for the past few years that I haven't given much thought at the theoretical level to how they fall apart. To be fair, constructivists have paid much less attention in general to norm death than they have to norm creation. Finnemore and Sikkink's "norm life cycle" stops at norm internalization. And even though scholars like Patrick Cottrell have pointed out that new norm creation itself usually happens by killing off old norms or institutions, there's not a lot of studies about how norms collapse.Then along...
Here is part one, where I noted Walt, the Duck, and Walter Russell Mead as the IR blogs I read almost always despite the avalanche of international affairs blogs now. Here are a few more: Martin Wolf: Here’s a grad school education in IPE, op-ed by op-ed, better day-to-day than either Krugman or the Economist. Not being an economist, but facing regular student questions for years about the Great Recession and the euro-zone crisis, I have found Wolf indispensible in explaining what happened in the last 5 years – and without that ‘bankers as masters of the universe’ schtick coming from CNBC,...
Our readers are surely aware of the contraception kerfuffle, the outpouring of criticism and controversy engendered by the Obama's administration's efforts to ensure that more American women have access to contraception as part of their health plans. With the insurance schemes of religious-affiliated universities and hospitals often not covering contraception services for women, the Obama administration sought to use the new health care law to extend access to contraception. (It took John Stewart to point out that many of these same plans cover Viagra for men but not contraception for...