I thought Charli's return meant I was off this beat, but what the hey. What if Shakespeare wrote Star Wars? Check it out here. Come to think of it, the whole brother and sister not knowing each other and almost falling in love seems like a Shakespeare comedy, does it...
Why, yes that is the Indian Foreign Minister, Salman Khurshid, and Norway's Foreign Affairs Minister and Political Scientist, Espen Barthe Eide, in Svalbard. Are they trying to tell Duck fans...
For those of you who don't monitor the front page of the APSA website on a daily basis, you may have missed the online petition for the recognition of a new African Politics section of APSA. Â I urge...
Note: this post was co-written with PTJ. Apologies for the comparative lack of structure and the fact that it is a bit repetitive. Note also that it contains a link to a temporarily un-gated copy of...
General David Petraeus advises Americans and their allies to be coldly realistic about what force can achieve. Oddly, he also advises them to prepare for a future where small wars are pretty much inevitable, where America must intervene early to prevent worse things happening later on, and where ‘stabilisation’ is a core part of war itself. Because, ultimately we sometimes have no choice. Looking back on the ‘lessons’ that have been ‘written in blood’ in America’s wars since 9/11, Petraeus thinks he can see the greatest lesson, but repeats a common fallacy: Our enemies will typically attack...
Are we headed to war in Syria?  The media seems to be going all in on the chemical weapons "red line" justification. How close are we to moving to implement a no-fly zone? Hezbollah is the real Red Line. Drezner:  realism trumps liberalism again. Behind yesterday's UN Syrian Casualty Count. Sunni clerics call for jihad against Assad and Egyptian government says Egyptians have freedom to travel to Syria if they'd like. Meanwhile: Did Erdogan blink? How the protests in Taksim Square have derailed Erdogan's plans to transform Turkey into a presidential system. This week in...