The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots secured an important victory last week when delegates of States Parties to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) voted unanimously to take up the issue as part of their work to oversee the implementation and further...
Michael Desch and Daniel Philpott at Notre Dame have concluded their two-year Mellon funded working group on religion and IR and published their final report titled Religion and International...
Action on Armed Violence is circulating some terrific info-graphs and advocacy videos documenting civilian harms from various conventional weapons in Syria: By even the most cautious estimates,...
Grand Strategy is an arcane and misapplied concept. Â Developing a Grand Strategy to deal with China that focuses on cyber capabilities is a dangerous move that will have large repercussions for the...
David Silbey on the long century of the US surveillance state. Don't throw the espionage baby out with the domestic-surveillance bathwater? Tom Nichols throws the gauntlet down at opponents of more active US involvement in the Syrian civil war. Dan Trombly ruminates on the concept of "blowback" in light of recent domestic terror attacks in the west. Developments in Arabic translation. Many people in my circles are gleefully forwarding a proposal for Massively Open Online Administration (MOOA). The e-magazine responsible is itself kind of interesting in of itself -- a product of the...
Chen Guangcheng, the Chinese dissident who found refuge last year in the United States with a fellowship at NYU is now claiming that he is being pushed out of NYU because his human rights advocacy and criticisms of the Chinese government is upsetting NYU's relationship with China. From the NYTimes: In a statement released Sunday, Mr. Chen said university officials were worried that his outspoken criticism of the Chinese government might threaten academic cooperation. N.Y.U. recently opened a campus in Shanghai, and a number of professors are involved in programs and research projects here...
I keep seeing this article pop around websites this morning: "Rule No. 1 for Female Academics: Don’t Have a Baby." I'm happy to see all the family friendly policies mentioned concerning assistant professors.  But, as the article points out, the "baby penalty" is also a concern for graduate students who are parents. My question: do you know of any family friendly policies for grad students?
Good morning. Â Here are some loosely connected articles on development, bureaucracy, and state power... I am quite taken by James Ferguson's metaphor of "swarming state power" as an alternative to James Scott's "controlling state power" and thus as a way of understanding contemporary "development" (a discourse whose objects have apparently all but abandoned progress for the "hope of egress"). Â Ferguson helps us to understand both why so many development projects "fail" and what development projects are actually (i.e. functionally) doing even as they fail repeatedly and spectacularly. Â ...
In our newish MA program in Global Policy Studies, it turns out "International Development" is the most popular concentration. Now, many of our students who are interested in this "specialization" have what I call a distinct project-based approach to development. They think of international development as projects foreigners go out and do. Since most of our students are from the United States, they envision themselves doing development the same way I did as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ecuador where I served from 1997-1999 (the photo above is of a quinoa export project I worked on with some...
Contrasting views on Obama foreign-policy and realism from Daniel Drezner and Sean Kay. The BBC's profile of Iranian President-elect, Hassan Rouhani. Michael J. Geary and Kevin A. Lees examine how the NSA scandal might impact Obama's trip to Europe. Chris Fair's testimony at the Hearing on “Protecting the Homeland Against Mumbai-Style Attacks and the Threat from Lashkar-e-Taiba" (PDF). Vladmir Putin: the most powerful man in Russia, sex symbol, former spy, and sports-memorabilia thief. And also: Gerard Toal discusses his new co-authored article, "Cartographic Exhibitionism? Visualizing the...
I'll admit that this is a rather anodyne title, but the alternatives involved language not suited for above-the-fold content. The tenure process involves power asymmetries that make life very unpleasant for assistant professors. They have to worry about alienating their colleagues and their administration. They interact daily with people -- who are too often petty, fickle, or, at least, mysterious -- who hold tremendous power over their careers. Then there's the whole publish-or-perish thing. Now, many of these indignities don't even rise to the level of first-world problems. Compared to the...
The Australian Defence Force (ADF) finds themselves in yet another sex scandal this week. The force has barely recovered from last year's 'skype scandal,' which involved members of a defense force academy videotaping sex without permission and streaming it to other members of the academy. This time it is alleged that officers have videotaped sex with other colleagues and civilian women and distributed the videos via the defence email system. It is a disappointing revelation considering the promises to rid the force of sexism following the scandal last year. If the allegations prove true, it...