The recent 'Maria' case- involving a young blonde girl taken from a Roma family and found to be the daughter of a Bulgarian Roma couple- has inspired greater scrutiny of Roma communities. More specifically, there have been subsequent cases of children taken from...
I have decided, following the controversy surrounding my post on networking, to remove myself as one of the permanent contributors to the Duck of Minerva. Through poorly chosen and ill-considered...
It's been a big week for football (that is, soccer to all you U.S. readers). The raffle for 2014 World Cup tickets in Brazil started today ($90 is the starting price for first round games). Brazil...
A new tumblr: "Everyday Power and Privilege in IR." David Axe lambasts the F-35. Cheryl Rofer recalls her trip to Semipalatinsk. A map of confirmed US-backed coups. Seth Masket holds up the 'tweets...
Let's get to the news and the comments: Tim Burke talks about the real intersection of science fiction, the great convergence, and international governance [Easily Distracted] Surowiecki talks Boeing and outsourcing [The New Yorker] Have Malian rebels destroyed ancient texts? [The New Yorker] Maybe intercepting a Taepo-dong is illegal [The Diplomat] I like reading about Mongolia and I don't think I have to justify it [The Diplomat] And also: This profile of former NFL coach Bill Walsh's quest for perfection mirrors many academics' lives [ESPN: The Magazine] IRB Horror Stories [Institutional...
In case folks have missed it, there is an upcoming deadline (FRIDAY!) for the 2013 ECPR General Conference in Bordeaux, September 4-7th.  Unlike many other conferences, EPCR paper proposals are submitted to already-organized panels. This often results in more cohesive panels and, one hopes, more helpful feedback.  Paper proposals are due this coming Friday and can be submitted through the various organized sections listed here.  ... And the conference is in Bordeaux, which is lovely and features nifty, futuristic trams built by Alain Juppé (pre-scandal). For those of you who work on...
This is a guest post by Brandon Valeriano and Ryan Maness. Cyberwar is a pressing international security problem. The news media breathlessly covers any potential attack before the facts are in. Policy briefs and reports are produced on all levels of government and private industry. It would then behoove us to take a step back and examine opinions about the cyber security threat according to perceptions among policymakers, academics, and cyber security experts in order to understand how the threat emanating from the cyber security realm is constructed in the public discourse. Each...
Last May, Jon Monten, Will Inboden and I published on Foreignaffairs.com the results of a survey of about 40 U.S. foreign policy professionals, split equally among Republicans and Democrats with nearly all of them having served in some capacity in the Executive Branch. As I discussed here on the Duck, we found some surprising sources of strength for bipartisan support for certain aspects of international cooperation, namely for Bretton Woods institutions, NATO, and on international trade. We wondered if Executive Branch folks were somehow different from their peers who served in a similar...
It’s a question faced by scientists daily: if you found that X wasn't associated with Y, would you report it?  What if you found that treatment X was harmful to Y, would you report your findings? For example, let’s say you are an oncologist and you just concluded, based on years of research, that smoking wasn’t associated with cancer  – would you report your findings? What if you were employed by the cancer drug’s maker or dealing with cancer personally, would you report your findings about treatment X then? Is it unethical to leave the results unpublished? Questions of personal biases and...
This is a guest post by Brent Sasley. Sasley is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Texas at Arlington. He blogs at Mideast Matrix and Open Zion. Follow him on Twitter. The Israeli election results are far messier than anyone had hoped, leading to furious debates about who got what right about the Israeli electorate. This seems to be especially true among Western analysts and media that aren’t close Israel watchers but do comment on Israeli politics. And it is messy. On the face of it, the religious (Shas, United Torah Judaism, Jewish Home) and...
North Korea Bruce Cumings' 2005 LRB article "We Look at It and See Ourselves" surely remains one of the best short articles on the Korean peninsula ever written. Â It is probably worth a revisit as tensions ramp up again. Paul Gottinger provided a good background piece on "South Korea's New Boss" in Counterpunch. Charles Armstrong, the Director of the Center for Korean Research at Columbia, blogs at CNN's GPS on "Why Sticks Don't Work With North Korea" Afghanistan A US Marine Captain reflects: "I killed people in Afghanistan. Was I right or wrong?" A review of Dalrymple's Return of a King:...
That Europe is caught up in a major financial crisis isn't news to anyone. Standing right at the crossroads, the Eurozone will either muddle through and risk another crisis onset in the near term or having scraped through its worst crisis in decades take strong steps on the necessary medium and long-term reforms. But what our British friends may not realize is how the vaunted special relationship is also coming to a crossroads. Prime Minister David Cameron’s large-sized gamble on the UK’s future European destiny has sent ripples of worry across the West, not least in Washington. ...