Following on my round of links on Thursday, this is a guest post from Jennifer Hadden from the University of Maryland who is in Warsaw at the global climate negotiations (follow her on Twitter here). Yeb Saño, Climate Change Commissioner of the Philippines, opened the...
Interpreting evidence related to poverty and development is never straightforward. Neo-liberal supporters of free market economics tend to point to economic growth as evidence that global inequality...
A prominent "rationalist" explanation for war concerns commitment problems created by the anticipation of rapid shifts in power (see also here and here). When a state expects that the mere passage...
The Monkey Cage has launched a symposium on the gender gap in academia. Jane Mansbridge, Barbara Walter, Sara Mitchell, Lisa Martin, Ryan Powers, Daniel Maliniak, Rick Wilson, Ashley Leeds, Beth...
As our august leader here at the Duck is putting on his editorial robes, I thought a bit of fresh perspective on the review process is in order. A fun take on the review process!
Good morning ducks... Here's your linkage... The Jerusalem Post reviews World War Z.  Is this the most pro-Israeli film ever made?  ... Probably not - even the trailer shows the wall being breached.  A Majinot mentality can't work in a film whose motto is: "movement is life." The terrorist attack on Sunday in Bodh Gaya is a big deal, even if the Western press is slow on the uptake.  This isn't just the holiest Buddhist site in India; it is the holiest Buddhist site in the world without a doubt.  (I've been there twice in the last twelve months and the security was pretty lax even though...
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Eric Grynaviski, who is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at George Washington University. When Mearsheimer and Walt wrote the Israel Lobby, I was skeptical. I bought the argument that supporters of Israel influenced US policy, but because I am not a realist, I did not buy the argument that this necessarily deflected the US from pursuing specific policies during the cold war or afterwards. The primary reason for my skepticism was the evidence: because of how recent US support for Israel is, there are few archival documents that have been...
Daniel Bier counters fear-mongering about the world's first genetically engineered babies, another fascinating case study of global normative ferment. But in truly weird science, humans can now transplant whole heads (or rather, bodies). Too bad this important advance comes too late for Ned Stark. -> William Beaty writes about the physics of traffic jams, proposing a simple solution ordinary citizens can use to  escape to de-clutter highways. Cyber-war, nano-weapons, and killer robots, oh my! International Review of the Red Cross has finally published a long-awaited special issue on...
In his most recent post, PTJ argues that "things like Freakonomics are basically corrosive and should be opposed whenever practicable".  While he repeats in that post (and the comments section) a number of dubious claims about what sorts of behavior are possible within a decision-theoretic framework, I think we're past the point in the conversation where it is useful to argue about the possibility of writing down a decision-theoretic model whose actors are capable of moral behavior and belonging to communities.1 In this post, I'd like to discuss the moral argument PTJ makes against...
My very quick search suggests that there's insufficient work on this subject. I know that Alexander Cooley has turned up some pretty amazing things on older intelligence cooperation, Mark Laffey and Jutta Weldes have done some great work on policing and global governance, and there's a lot of cognate stuff under the rubric of bio-politics (e.g.) and permanent states of exception, but it seems to me that more direct analysis is called for. Because, for example: France's foreign intelligence service intercepts computer and telephone data on a vast scale, like the controversial US Prism...
For the ultimate outcome of the Arab Spring and the prospects of moderate Islamic influence of politics.... ... is it more important that democracy not be thoroughly flouted as it just was in the removal of President Morsi in Egypt, or that a major lesson may have just been delivered to extreme Islamic parties/governments that had better govern inclusively or their people might prevent them from continuing to stay in office?
In the spirit of the dramatic events of yesterday, we at the Duck want to bring your morning linkage with news of the Zimmerman trial. Err, scratch that, we'll leave that to CNN. Lots of attention being directed to the dramatic events in Egypt, plus some obligatory posts below about conservation, including reports that Joseph Kony has turned to poaching elephants (what unsavory s--t will that guy not do?). On Egypt, for me the requisite judgment is, at this stage, ambivalence. I can't see how the events unfold in a positive way. You have the ouster of a democratically elected leader but one...