Good morning! Â Here's your linkage... Atul Gawande asks why do some medical ideas (i.e. norms) spread quickly and others slowly? Thomas Rutig re-examines whether lessons can be learnt between the conflicts in Afghanistan and Mali. Udai Bhanu Singh assesses the Bodh...
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Elizabeth Saunders who is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at George Washington University. In this year of Iraq-related anniversaries, this summer...
Good morning... Salman Adil Hussain reviews Deepa Kumar's Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire. Hussain writes, "Kumar shines a bright light on liberal Islamophobia, and shows how the Obama...
Last week I purchased a Nintendo handheld (on steep discount) for the express purpose of playing Okamiden. Okami is one of my most favoritist games evah; even though Okamiden is basically more of...
Most of my public comments on Snowden have focused on how to evaluate his actions as a US citizen and someone entrusted with a high-level security clearance. Here I want to focus on an analytical concern--that of international hierarchy. I don't have a strong sense of the degree that other scholars associate me with the "new hierarchy studies," but a major theme of my work is that we are better off understanding crticial aspects of international relations as structured by patterns of super- and subordination than as anarchical. Indeed, my sense is that two of the most prominent advocates of...
Germany benefits from US signal intelligence. When we consider the widespread industrial espionage carried out by the Chinese, it is helpful to remember France's extensive track record of stealing secrets from its friends and neighbors.* Israel is a major espionage threat to the United States. The British collect a lot of intelligence on allies and adversaries, even if deploying fake rocks in Russia might not have been the best idea in the history of spying. Russian and Chinese spying should require little in the way of elaboration: they both engage in a lot of it. There's nothing unusual...
I am delighted to report that as of last Friday at 7:02pm I have completed final revisions on my latest book manuscript. This culminates a project on issue neglect that started with my observations about children born of war, emerged as a theory of "agenda-vetting," and involved a detailed NSF-funded study of the rise and fall of issues in the human security network. It also includes detailed case studies on several norm-building campaigns I've been following since 2007: the campaign to make amends to civilians harmed in legitimate battle operations, the campaign to ban infant male...
Hi Duck friends. Here are some links to start your week... Liao Yiwu served four years in prison for reciting his poem "Massacre" in memory of the 1989 Tienanmen Square protests. Â His horrifying prison memoir reminds us that "China remains a prison of the mind: prosperity without liberty." Â More importantly, the memoir show the ways in which the Leninist-capitalist Chinese system of government and economy is replicated inside the prison. Â The poet's memoir is a portrait of China painted in shit, but it is a rather telling portrait nonetheless. Mong Palatino argues that the trans-boundary...