This article is cross posted from the Scottish Global Forum. In this form it is slightly modified and hyperlinked. The Nature of Threats to Scotland In March of 2015, a cry goes out in the town centre, everyone reacts quickly. Valuables are hidden underground; women...
Editor’s Note: this is an abbreviated version of a post that originally appeared on my personal blog. How can international institutions foster cooperation given that they lack enforcement...
When people lament about how broken academia is now (for example Higgs of Higgs-Boson), I am so tempted to generalize about the olden days: Many, if not most, jobs were not advertised publicly and...
Mandela's memorial service was yesterday, and the speeches and coverage were laudatory, as they should be, and the crowd was raucous, celebratory, despite the rain. Obama in his speech challenged...
Hollywood’s solution to intractable interstate conflicts This is what happens when you write in the area of Japanese-Korean relations. Pretty much everybody hates you, because you don’t tell them what they want to hear, and then maximalists come out of the woodwork to, as Robert Farley aptly put it, “explore Japanese-Korean animosity one angry e-mail at a time.” As I’ve argued before, there’s little domestic cost to the either party for the most outrageous rhetoric, so this just goes on and on. Given that intractability, the Obama administration’s big idea to untangle this - sending...
This week Dan Drezner hosted a guest post on the politics of Miss Universe and I responded by pointing out the lack of/and the need for a gender analysis in his post. In his response, Drezner asks an important question: "Why on God's green earth would I want to venture out from my professional comfort zone of American foreign policy and global political economy to blog about the politics of gender -- just so I can be told by experts on gender politics that I'm doing it wrong?" I think we should discuss this. I assume there are many others in the field who feel the same way. Writing about...
The diplomatic dustup over Syria brought Russia in from the cold but simultaneously froze any notion that western allies were getting their strategic act together. Nonetheless, although the mistakes in the U.S. and UK’s approach to building support at home and abroad for an intervention in Syria confused leaders and citizens alike, these mistakes should not be interpreted as an abrupt turn-around in their and their allies' strategic thinking. In fact the Europeans, even under a prolonged condition of austerity, are making progress filling in the capability gaps made clear in the course of...
Last week Dan Drezner asked What Does Miss Universe Tell us About World Politics in 2013? The post starts off on a positive note- that one can find politics anywhere- before it descends into one of the most classic examples of gender-avoidance/oblivion I've read in ages. Drezner swiftly calls on "the most qualified person on earth" to outsource engaging on a lady topic write the remaining post. I felt like I was back at uni and my male professor had brought in a female body (any female body) to teach the week on gender. Sure she has a PhD and was Miss Earth- and she does have a unique...
Given the low salaries many of us start out at, we probably overly identify with the crisis contained within this trailer (no significant spoilers):
This week, more news from the relief effort and typhoon Haiyan and how the events in the Philippines threaten to overshadow the on-going climate negotiations in Warsaw. The Security and Relief Situation on the Ground U.S. military ramps up aid to Philippines with up to 1,000 soldiers likely on the ground from Okinawa in short order, ferrying Filipino troops and aid supplies Plenty of gasoline but gas stations won't open for fear of looting; mayor, a relative of Imelda Marcos, urges residents to flee, tells foreign aid workers "Please be self-sufficient, because there’s nothing" Tacloban so...
Today's thought experiment: A foreign national is killed in your state, igniting emotional protests and a road blockade by members of his community. Your state is almost entirely economically dependent on tourism. There's standard boilerplate for these events, right? You express regret, you pledge to investigate the murder, you vow that locals who violently attacked protesters will also be brought to justice. Now imagine that it was a Nigerian national who had been killed. And the death may have been linked to rival drug gangs fighting over territory. Does the picture change? Recent events...
The Pop 5 is a new 'test' series of posts touching on events in pop culture and linking them back (briefly, hopefully, and sometimes loosely) to IR and politics. The posts are meant to be LIGHT, but also to take seriously the influence of popular culture on how we understand the world. It is, after all, one of the dominant lenses through which our students frame IR. I'm a self diagnosed pop culture addict with a list of shameful (and juicy) fixes (one of my most shameful pop culture habits will be revealed later in the post). The focus today is on five recent pop culture events and what they...