In the spirit of the holidays, here's a fun movie trailer that actually kind of depicts a war on Christmas.... ok, a war on Santa. H/T to OTB for providing the video. And a big H/T to the Duck-sters out there who read our stuff here, give us comments, and otherwise...
We're a few weeks into the call for nominations for the 2014 OAIS Awards. Â It's time to get serious. Â We've had a number of impressive nominations, but given the excellent content out there, we're...
The effort to develop a single 5th generation fighter plane has been a challenge for the US and its allies. The F-35 is very expensive and may underperform. The quality of debate about this plane...
With the assumption of an ongoing global cyber arms race, Western governments signed an agreement to limit the sharing and selling of dangerous cyber technologies. David Livingstone notes, “[Cyber...
via Geek in Heels, your friendly Friday Star Wars Meyers-Brigg test. Which character are you? Also: Star Wars VII release date has been, well, released. Doug Mataconis comments.
I'm going to try it out this spring with my Introduction to International Relations class. (I'll also post my lectures online, which I believe will make mine the second Intro IR course available to the general public---though if you know of others, please provide links in the comments.) Have any of you tried it? If so, I'd love to hear about your experiences in the comments. Below the fold are some thoughts on why I think it will help some students get more out of my class. Giving students the ability to pause, rewind, and relisten... I talk fast (I sadly have but two modes: too fast and way...
Tomorrow, my great friend and coauthor Dursun Peksen and I will collect our $200 for winning the best paper award at the annual meeting of ISA-Midwest in St. Louis. The paper, which I’ve talked about a little bit before at the Duck, is actually forthcoming now at the Journal of Politics.[1] Dursun has won quite a few prizes before but this is my first time winning any sort of best paper award.[2] The award information says the prize is supposed to be in cash. I’m hoping it is because this will probably be the first time I’ve had access to cash with my name on it since I was a kid.[3] I’m...
Here are a few articles for your consideration. For those of you interested in conservation, we have had a disturbing pattern of stories about rapid declines in species around the world, some of them due to poaching, what has been described as an "environmental crime wave," and others as a result of disease. All of this suggests to me that nature is in serious trouble as population, disruptive modernity, and consumptive pressures may be taking their toll on the natural world. On top of existing stories about declines in elephants, rhinos, bees, bats, and amphibians, we now have reports of a...
It is shocking how little attention Iran’s recent efforts to satisfy the international community’s demands on nuclear question have received in the news media and academic discourse. As I write this, there are 1182 related news stories on news.google.com related to Rob Ford’s struggles with the crack cocaine and only 85 related to Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Prepping for my graduate course on IR Theory, it struck me how little we talk about the process of desecuritization. The securitization process is well covered, we often are able to analyse, describe, and deconstruction the process...
Two pieces got emailed to me in the last few days that nicely illustrate just how entrenched semi-imperial thinking has become in Washington, how wildly disconnected from the reality of US security our foreign policy community’s threat assessments have become, and the hysteria that greets serious debate on DoD’s size in this post-Great Recession era of high unemployment and large deficits. This, by good-journalist-turned-disturbing-militarist Robert Kaplan, and this, by the ‘Iraq was a victory’ crowd at AEI. Here’s Kaplan: “The bottom may be starting to fall out of the U.S. defense budget. I...
Lionel Beehner and Joseph Young write in The National Interest that while targeted killing by drone strike is increasingly denounced (and decreasingly used by states), cross-border incursions by counter-terror ground troops are an increasingly accepted practice – despite the fact that both violate state sovereignty. Citing the capture of Abu Anas Al-Libi by US special ops in Libya, drug kingpins by Brazil in Bolivia and Peru, and the frequency of cross-border incursions in Africa, they express surprise that not all violations of sovereignty are equally frowned upon, and explain this based on...
The year 2014 is nearly on us, and reflections on World War One are already weighing down bookshop shelves. In my own research, I've stumbled across an odd tendency: that whereas in Britain the cause of World War One, if not its conduct, attracts strong supporters as well as critics, the first Gulf War is remembered as a bit of a disappointment. Consider the difference with one of history's archetypal 'limited' wars, which few seem keen to defend. In early 1991, having defeated the fourth largest army in the world after a bombing campaign and 100 hours of ground war, President Bush I called...