This video from Africa for Norway provides a humorous way to think about foreign aid: I suppose there is a good chance readers have already seen the video -- more than 1.5 million people have viewed it on youtube.
Africa for Norway
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This video from Africa for Norway provides a humorous way to think about foreign aid: I suppose there is a good chance readers have already seen the video -- more than 1.5 million people have viewed it on youtube.
Maybe we should have named the blog the "Seal of Minerva."Photo: Dan NexonThe US exit strategy in Afghanistan is in shambles; Josh Foust explains. Jing Gao describes condemnations of the anti-Japan...
Just like Barack Obama in 2008, Mitt Romney apparently believes the silly theories of partisan preference popular among his base. Or he's craven enough to peddle the argument to his donors. Neither...
New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy is now available via the iTunes store.Bizarro 2004 continues: this time, Republicans spend lots of time complaining about systematic bias in polling...
Go Luxemburg!According to Michael Beckley, the United States should be deeply concerned about the power-political position of Luxemburg, Denmark, Switzerland, and others. Okay, not really. But that's the implication of Beckley's top-line response to Erik Voeten's dissection of his recent article in International Security.Normally economic growth rates dovetail with changes in wealth gaps. But these measures often diverge when comparing a rich country like the United States to a poor one like China. Since 1991, China’s per capita income rose 11 percent annually while America’s rose 3.5...
:Here is part one, where I argued that international relations as a field has become increasingly uncomfortable with the America’s post-Cold War hegemony and the level of force used in the GWoT, but…2. We’re drifting toward R2PSimultaneously, we are elated that the Libya operation worked, (against all odds given the Iraq experience and what we know about foreign intervention in LDCs generally). Lots of Duck writers supported the intervention. (I found Jon Western’s arguments last spring particularly persuasive; some of my writing on Libya is here and here.) Even if you didn’t support it, and...
Lots of folks use war as analogy for football (US version) or football as analogy for war, such as the blitz starting with war going to football and going back to war. How about we take a key concept from football and from other sports and apply it to US (and perhaps NATO) defense policy: the salary cap? In professional sports, leagues have had to impose restraints upon owners of teams since competition among them (combined with nepotism leading to lousy decision-making) cause salaries to escalate. As a result, bargaining with unions tends to be about the split of the income, with each...
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has released a new report alleging that CIA-piloted drones have regularly attacked rescuers and funerals as well as high-value targets - a damning claim given Obama's recent assertion to the contrary in his digital town hall meeting.The report correctly suggests that in the context of international humanitarian law, intentionally targeting individuals who come to the rescue of victims would be considered a violation of the rules of war.* But in doing so, and in using the term "drone wars" to describe this campaign of executions, the BJI also...
THE CANARD"All the fake news that's fit to print."-- Los Angeles*A political science professor at University of Southern California came under fire this week for the role he may have played behind-the-scenes on a recent documentary about the heavy metal band Metallica. Administrators at the university are investigating whether Professor Brian Christopher Rathbun’s participation in the project may have violated rules permitting faculty to consult no more than one day a week on projects outside the university. The film in question, Some Kind of Monster, is described by Rotten Tomatoes as “a...
Taking Brian Rathbun’s advice, I was reading chapter 4 of Perception and Misperception, when it struck me that Jervis’ argument about values incongruity could be applied to the two most popular normative positions in IR today – that western power and international law can help reduce violence and nastiness in the world (R2P), and that a semi-imperial US is killing far too many people against a fairly minor threat and should retrench somewhat. But increasingly I think that retrenchment, which is traditionally associated with the left in IR (US ‘imperialism’), has become a realist position.1....
 How are pieces of research like eggs? Well, I was having a fun conversation with a grad student of mine while we were dining in the aftermath of a workshop on failed states, and I was suggesting a potential research strategy. The point I was trying to make is that you don't want to waste your research. At first, I was using bullets--but given our topics, violence, and given that bullets do not degrade over time, eggs made more sense.The basic idea is that when you do research, you don't always use everything you learn for a particular piece. Indeed, one of Saideman's rules of...
I am not a nerd. I have tried to make this abundantly clear. So what if I just watched 12 episodes of Battlestar Galactica in the last week? That doesn’t PROVE anything. But I haven’t always been a fan of period pieces and pro football. My anti-nerdishness in high school expressed itself much differently – I was a metalhead. Not one of those poofy-haired spandex-pants-wearing metalheads. If you wore a Poison shirt to school, I’d have shunned you. A Warrant shirt and I’d have kicked you in the balls. Metallica, Iron Maiden, Megadeth, Black Sabbath – those were my bands. I had the mullet to...