Last week, I finally had the opportunity to read Lisa Martin’s recent piece on compliance entitled Against Compliance. Prof. Martin meticulously evaluates the literature on compliance and concludes that compliance is the wrong dependent variable to uncover the causal...
Yep, it is that time of year as each network rolls out its new programs with the first cancellations already being announced. This year, there is one that is under the radar--a sitcom based on...
Human Rights Watch has a new report on the killing of 190 civilians in early August by members of five Islamist rebel groups:  Ahrar al-Sham, Islamic State of Iraq and Sham,  Jabhat al-Nusra,  Jaish...
[Note: This is a guest post by Ardeshir Pezeshk, PhD candidate at University of Massachusetts-Amherst, in collaboration with Charli Carpenter.] For a brief moment a few weeks back, law and policy...
Good morning... Salman Adil Hussain reviews Deepa Kumar's Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire. Hussain writes, "Kumar shines a bright light on liberal Islamophobia, and shows how the Obama administration’s emphasis on homegrown terrorism generated a lot of talk about ‘terrorists in our midst’ in the mainstream American media and presented right-wing Islamophobes with the opportunity they needed to (re-)popularise the old ‘Islamic peril’." David J. Morris asks: "How much does culture matter for P.T.S.D.?"  The following quote from the article is powerful and worth contemplating: "The...
Last week I purchased a Nintendo handheld (on steep discount) for the express purpose of playing Okamiden. Okami is one of my most favoritist games evah; even though Okamiden is basically more of the same, I'm cool with that. Yesterday we had to buy off the wee one--we did, in fact, have a pretty terrible day from her perspective--so we offered to purchase her a game to play. That led to Animal Crossing: A New Leaf and a complete loss of custody over the Nintendo. So complete, in fact, that she basically bought it from me. So here's the question: beyond the aforementioned piece of crack in a...
My initial reaction is that this is a spot of good news: Alan Turing, the Enigma codebreaker who took his own life after being convicted of gross indecency under anti-homosexuality legislation, is to be given a posthumous pardon. The government signalled on Friday that it is prepared to support a backbench bill that would pardon Turing, who died from cyanide poisoning at the age of 41 in 1954 after he was subjected to "chemical castration". Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon, a government whip, told peers that the government would table the third reading of the Alan Turing (statutory pardon) bill at...
Friday nerd blogging was delayed due to a powerful thunderstorm that disrupted power in the SW part of Ottawa. Anyhow, most of us nerdish folks would prefer to be at Comic-Con this week. Alas, most of us have day jobs. So, here is a video presented at Comic-Con that marks the death toll of the past three seasons:
Is it 1953 or 2013?  2013 Aspen Security Forum is currently meeting in Aspen Meadows, CO.  Here's the list of speakers -- scroll through and see if anything strikes you.  HT: Tamara Cofman Wittes. An excellent piece by Naunihal Singh that concludes for all the talk of a unique people's revolution, the Egyptian coup (yes, it was a coup) was a pretty common variant of coups.  Spoiler alert:  It's the economy stupid. The Obama administration had little influence over the events and even less consistency on Egypt. William Harris says the western liberal narrative on the Gezi Park...
It’s always a pleasure to guest-post my good friend Dave Kang. Dave teaches at the University of Southern California and runs their Korean Studies Institute (the pic). Here are some previous guest posts he’s written (one, two, three). Here is his encouragement to actually apply international relations theory to East Asia. I can’t agree more. There is far too much superficial, think-tank wonkery about East Asia (how many nukes does China have? will Pyongyang test another missile? and so on), and not nearly enough real theory. Dave does that, and you should too. So instead of yet another,...
Recently, I finished teaching a month long summer course on International Relations to mainly first and second year undergrads at the University of Missouri. Although I’ve taught summer courses before, this was actually one of my first experiences with having to –for the love of all things holy! – do what my public school teaching spouse does and ACTIVELY TEACH IN A CLASSROOM WITH THE SAME STUDENTS EVERY DAY OF THE WEEK. This summer class got me thinking – for most people, how different is the summer teaching experience from the the typical semester teaching experience? Like any good...
Earlier this week I posted about the classified DOD study showing a high rate of civilian harm from drone attacks. Not much else can be said about this finding by analysts until the study is de-classified, so instead let me discuss at some length the one other thing we do know: that the media has badly misreported this story. The headline should not be "New Study: Drones Kill Ten Times More Civilians" as so many articles are claiming. It should read "DOD Analyst: Classified Study Shows Drones Likelier to Cause Civilian Harm." What is the difference? There are three. The first is the...