A weak "contrarian" post from Daveed Gartenstein-Ross on Tom Rick's appearance on Fox News. Watch Daveed flail further in comments. Defence Talk: Pakistan test fires a nuclear-capable ballistic missile and hackers target IAEA. More on the latter from Jeffrey Lewis....
I'm crashing on multiple deadlines, so in lieu of "morning linkage".... Last night I was in a twitter conversation with Phil Arena and Kindred Winecoff about Fabio Rojas' recent post at...
Patient voters in Zimbabwe, from The Guardian 2008.Democracy sits in time. It is a looping circuit of accountability between leaders and led. Voters authorise leaders to act on certain problems....
This is just a quick note to ask for input.I'm planning out the Duck of Minerva podcast schedule for the next few weeks. My original plan was to alternate interviews with some kind of "riff" episode...
In a previous post, I puzzled about the popularity of Downton Abbey. It is (was?) a very well-done show, but no different, I thought at the time, than the standard PBS Masterpiece Theater that generally attracts very little viewership. One of the responses was that Downton was a soap opera dressed up as costume drama. I didn’t see it at the time. Downton seemed to hit all the usual British period piece points – the problem of the heir, the declining fortunes of the aristocracy in the modern age. But that comment was prescient. Downton Abbey revealed this week that it is actually a soap opera...
So I am re-reading Snyder’s Myths of Empire for an R&R. (Btw, not that this is bad book, but is anyone’s reading list in life now primarily driven by anonymous reviewers and the need to get in print for promotion? ) .The book is theoretically complex (almost too many moving parts to my mind), and the cases are an exciting read. But when it was big in the 90s (when I first read it), no one really thought about China as fitting the argument. But today, it strikes me that China would be an interesting prediction case for the book. Certainly China looks a lot like the kind of expansionist...
Yes, it's soon to be back. Now if you've read A Clash of Kings, you might rightly wonder who the "priest" is in this allegory, since while Season 2 will feature kings and rich men the only important religious figure is actually a woman. But if you're read A Clash of Kings closely and obsessively you know that the narration by Varys in the trailer is only passingly related to setting up Season 2 itself, and is instead a more generic tale about political power that serves as part of the dialogue (and not a particularly important part at that)in a particular scene on p. 50. “In a room sit three...
Photo credit: lhgszch on Flickr.Back in December 2009, I wrote a post for the Duck called "Wal-mart Isn't Green." Jared Diamond had written a provocative op-ed about various green business initiatives for the NY Times and Steve Walt had blogged about it too. I recently thought about that exchange because the December issue of The Atlantic included an interesting article by the Asia Society's Orville Schell called "How Walmart Is Changing China." Much of the article considers burgeoning environmental initiatives involving Walmart and China:The world’s biggest corporation and the world’s most...
Social/Science/Fiction preliminary course outlineSIS-419.B01, Summer session 2012Professor Patrick Thaddeus JacksonThis course will meet Mondays and Wednesdays, 1:00pm-4:10pm, from 21 May until 28 June, excluding the Memorial Day holiday on 28 May.Course Objective and DescriptionSocial science has the explanation of society as its explicit goal. Social scientists often try to achieve this goal by studying historical situations in order to elucidate the impact of various factors on outcomes, in the hopes that those impacts can then be extrapolated to other cases. Authors of science fiction...
It's easy to think of the Security Council as essentially a reflection of great power interests when we see outcomes such as the failure of a resolution calling for President Assad's departure. However I am re-reading Cora True-Frost's article on the other side of the Security Council this week, and thought I'd flag this article as an excellent example of scholarship about the power and politics of such international organizations as norm consumers / diffusers. In short, her work reminds us that the UNSC not only sometimes wields (through its members and procedures) institutional and...
A few years back, when global warming was near the top of the national and global agendas, a surprising new activist suddenly took the field: the Pentagon. In 2009, it called climate change a “threat” to national security. In 2010, it lauded the climate with its ultimate recognition, inclusion in the Quadrennial Defense Review. All of this was uncritically conveyed by journalists on the Pentagon and environmental beats.Recently, the first effort to test whether climate change in fact has security implications was published by the Journal of Peace Research. Its bottom line: “Only...
Guest Post by Joel OestreichA few days ago I met the woman in the attached photograph. Her name is Karima. She is a college graduate who was born a male and, at 21, had gender reassignment surgery. Some time later she entered the “Miss Transgender India” contest and took fifth place. Her boyfriend, out of jealousy, set her on fire (her neck, torso, and upper arms show terrible scars) and broke her leg so badly that she can no longer stand unassisted.After that experience, Karima joined a group of “hijra”. In India, hijra are communities of transgendered people who identify as women or who...