Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Alexandre Debs and Nuno P. Monteiro, both of Yale University. In it, they discuss the causes of the Iraq War, a subject of some recent discussion at The Duck of Minerva. This post discusses their...
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Ryan C. Maness of the University of Illinois at Chicago and Brandon Valeriano of the University of Glasgow. In the rush to note the changing face of the...
Todd Smith, Anustubh Agnihotri, and I have put together a new resource of subnational education and infrastructure access indicators for Africa, released as part of the Climate Change and Africa...
A common complaint among international-relations scholars is that our journals don't sufficiently engage with big, new, and pressing issues of world politics. Those that do, on the other hand, often...
Just before Independence Day, an analyst for a defense research agency stated in a media interview that a classified DoD study shows that drones are likelier to cause civilian harm than attacks from manned fighters. Lawrence Lewis, a researcher for the Center for Naval Analyses, says these findings resulted from a  statistical analysis he conducted using classified data from Afghanistan mid 2010-mid 2011 as part of a project funded by DoD's Joint Center for Operational Analysis. If true, this would dramatically shift the discussion about the humanitarian impact and value of armed...
The idea that citizens should be empowered by law to lethally judge who is a criminal threat is dangerous and wrong. Here's one reason why: Just a small-n social experiment? Yes, though here are some stats to demonstrate how this does and is likely to play out in the criminal justice system..
Good morning... Jarrod Hayes discusses his new book, Constructing National Security: US Relations with India and China. Mark Safranski (i.e. zen of Zenpundit) points us to Lt. General Prakash Katosh's "Optimising the Potential of Special Forces." [Original Article] Shyam Saran argues that India's new role as an observer on the Arctic Council should be used to restrain the headlong rush into an ecological catastrophe. Steve Aftergood notes that the Obama Administration does not disclose most Presidential Policy Directives even when they are not classified.  A reason for the lack of...
The current issue of the International Journal of Comparative Sociology has a special issue on trade and travel. In it, sociologists apply network analysis in domains familiar to international-relations scholars. I haven't read the articles yet, but I thought the cross-disciplinary dimension was interesting enough to ask SAGE to make the contents available. You can download them through July. I'm about halfway through Aliette de Bodard's Obsidian and Blood trilogy, and am enjoying it immensely. If the concept of Tenochtitlan Noir Fantasy isn't enough to interest you, then I'm not sure why...
The American retailer response to Bangladesh worker safety  -- American firms will monitor and report, but not much else. For those who want to become more socially informed consumers -- missed this last month when Forbes tested the Buycott app. The Oil Drum shuts down:  It seems peak oil peaked before oil did. But, did the rise in fracking contribute to its death? Joshua Goldstein looks at the new Uppsala data on Syria and global battle deaths. Eric Reeves warns that "Darfur teeters on the edge of a complete humanitarian collapse and uncontrollable violence." and... Can an organization...
Lawfare T2000 from Adama on Vimeo. The video you see is not just an intriguing and entertaining way to express one position in legal arguments around the debate over autonomous weapons. It represents a fascinating foreign policy artifact, a data point in the policy discourse over the value of a pre-emptive ban on autonomous weapons, one in which science fiction metaphors are given a prime place. This raises intriguing questions about the relationship between science fiction and foreign policy and how we might study it. The creator of this video is Tom Malinowski, who has just...
As Comic Con approaches and the Course for the Force begins, we, of course, want to sing:
I spent most of the past week in Kansas City, MO while my daughter competed at the Tumbling and Trampoline National Championships. If you must know, she did fine. I'm most proud of how she handled herself. She was expected to do very well in one of her events, but she made some mistakes and underperformed. She didn't let it get to her, however, and we had a great time. This was the first time I'd set foot in Kansas City. In fact, I've never been in Missouri before. I had no idea how cool the architecture is. Kansas City has a number of pre-war landmarks, including Municipal Auditorium, which...