As many of our readers know, I am the incoming editor-in-chief of International Studies Quarterly, the "flagship journal" of the International Studies Association. My team will begin to take new submissions in October. The full handoff occurs in January of 2014. The...
To my mind, the situation in Syria has prompted an incredibly thoughtful debate within the political science community, one that undermines the idea that scholars have become irrevocably detached...
The Chinese state media could perhaps be forgiven for mistaking  fictional Battlestar Galactica blueprints for future US fleet schematics this week, given this. This incident has me thinking about...
Syria updates: The White House's public assessment of last week's chemical weapons attack. Deborah Avant -- Action is not synonymous with intervention. Is there a moral argument for intervention?...
You might not have been aware of this when the Washington Post paywall went up back in June, but there is no paywall if you have a .edu/.mil/.gov email address. Go here to obtain your free access. From the website: By registering with a valid .gov/.mil/.edu email address, you will get free, unlimited digital access to washingtonpost.com whether you are at work, at home or on your mobile device. Not sure what this means for their business model, but I'm certainly appreciative because the proliferation of paywalls meant limited the number of publications most of us could afford. I'm not sure...
One line of discussion this past week has been whether it makes any kind of moral sense to think that  death by chemical weapon is so much worse than death by "conventional" weapons. Video imagery captured by BBC in the aftermath of another horrific massacre in Syria yesterday throws this into stark relief. At least ten children burned to death and scores others were left with horrifying injuries after a flammable substance was dropped on a school playground yesterday. I will put together some thoughts on why the chemical weapon taboo is so politically robust whereas an equally comprehensive...
Two kinds of military intervention are being discussed and conflated by political elites (like Nicholas Kristof) and international diplomats. The first is an enforcement operation to punish a state for violating a widespread and nearly universal global prohibition norm against the use of chemical weapons. This is what Kristof refers to in the title of his Times op-ed, "Reinforce a Norm in Syria."Â The second is a humanitarian operation to protect civilians against a predatory government. This is what Kristof means when he compares proposed military strikes in Syria to intervention that...
It's Syria week. Post use of chemical weapons, some sort of intervention looks more likely than not. We are conflicted. Here to help us make sense of this: The intel that suggests the Syrian regime did it, but unclear command and control George Packer on our inner dialogue about why intervention is necessary but folly James Fallows on the folly part Erica Chenoweth on the history of interventions, again emphasizing folly, here and here Jon Western says not so fast, what is this case of? Bosnia or Iraq? Or something else? Eric Voeten concurs Ian Hurd and Charli Carpenter on breaking...
So, I ran into Dan Drezner in the trendy-food part of the West Loop in Chicago tonight, as you do when you are at APSA. Dan asked if I was planning to respond to his post on networking, which is critical of my earlier post. Honestly, it was not high on my agenda, but who can resist networking as a motivation to write a post on networking? In my post, I suggest that networking can have efficiency, career opportunity, and political benefits, with the caveat that it is not easy, does not always come naturally, and can actually be harmful if it goes awry. Dan suggests that neither myself nor...
So, in the interests of shameless self-promotion, I just wanted to mention that if you are attending APSA and stop by the Cambridge U Press booth, there should be copies of my new book with Ethan Kapstein entitled AIDS Drugs for All: Social Movements and Market Transformations. Pick up a copy, or order a hard or softback version here for a 20% discount (an e-version should be out soon). Below the fold, I'll describe the book and unpack the argument, but I wanted to raise the question here: who is doing good work in the discipline on the politics of transnational social movements and markets?...
In the New York Times yesterday, Northwestern University political scientist Ian Hurd lays down the law on Syria and intervention: As a legal matter, the Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons does not automatically justify armed intervention by the United States... Syria is a party to neither the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972 nor the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993... Syria is a party to the Geneva Protocol, a 1925 treaty that bans the use of toxic gases in wars. But this treaty was designed after World War I with international war in mind, not internal conflicts. [And] the...
I guess most folks are on the way to APSA. Have fun in Chicago if you're going--and if you're a member of the APSA council, please consider moving the convention to some weekend besides the first week of school. (Also, #SeattleEveryYear. Just saying! Especially if it's going to be in August.) Here's some links: Dani Nedal is also skeptical of Syria. Also BLTN: great post from Kristen Coopie Allen on how where you raise funds influences election outcomes. Plot twist: in-district support is less effective than out-district support. Might be a repeat, but Jay Ulfelder's post on the G-DELT...