Aside from major sporting events, there have been a few items of import in the news. Health A new polio outbreak in Syria is endangering the drive for global eradication Climate Change A 2012 story that I missed, a drive to replace dirty cook stoves in India using...
Drones are on the international agenda this week, with Pakistan excoriating the US at the General Assembly and with human rights heavyweights Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch launching a...
There have been a spate of posts about why folks have quit academia.... so much so that Dan Drezner issued this challenge: Has anyone written a "Why I Haven't Quit the Academy" post yet? — Daniel...
“The current blackout is a result of a cyber attack” “It will happen” Ominous words from the National Geographic channel and their premier movie this weekend. Not really sure how the news reporter...
The recent 'Maria' case- involving a young blonde girl taken from a Roma family and found to be the daughter of a Bulgarian Roma couple- has inspired greater scrutiny of Roma communities. More specifically, there have been subsequent cases of children taken from their Roma families because they did not 'look' Roma; however subsequent DNA tests confirmed the children to be the 'legitimate' biological children of their parents. A recent Spectator post calls the cases: a clash of "two great hysterias...racism and child-snatching, the Guardian’s obsession versus the Sun’s." These cases have...
Halloween is not celebrated in Turkey. Yet if they were celebrating Halloween, Turks who support democracy, secularism, human rights, and the rule of law would not have a hard time finding a haunted house. The country seems like a haunted house. This group of Turks, “modern bandits” in the eyes of the Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan, have long been fearful of Turkey’s future. Now they are even more alarmed. And there is good reason for that. A glance at few of the scary things that have happened since spring/summer 2013 explains why. Gezi protests of last summer were not about a park. People...
The following is a guest-post from Martin Edwards, professor at Seton Hall’s School of Diplomacy and International Relations. Martin’s website is here. How do Americans think about the United Nations? The results of recent surveys by the Pew Research Global Attitudes Project and the Better World Campaign offer some insights on this question. These organizations have tracked opinions on the United Nations since 2004 and 2009, and the findings are based on random samples of adults and registered voters, respectively. One of the findings in both surveys is that there are partisan differences in...
The Guardian article this week that disclosed the story of U.S. eavesdropping on the leaders of several US allies said that the surveillance produced "little reportable intelligence." This isn't really a surprise -- I can't really imagine that listening to German Chancellor Merkel's phone conversations are going to give US analysts and policymakers a whole lot more than they get from open source and normal diplomatic channels. So why does the US do it? The cheap answer to this question is that it comes from that sinister NSA organization. From this morning's NYTimes: In Washington, the...
Watch Game of Thrones or you might be foolish enough to dare a mighty Khal to engage in a slap game.
In the Monkey Cage’s recent symposium on gender and political science, David Lake writes how important it is that our scholarly networks become less gendered, how male scholars must make an effort to mentor women in the field. In my view, the importance of mentorship cannot be understated. Without the support of several scholars in security studies, not all but many of them men, I may have indeed decided that this field was not for someone like me. In my first year of graduate school, I was beginning to see myself as more of an “IR theory” than a “security studies” student (yes, whatever...
Can third parties do more than foster temporary, unstable ceasefires? Without perpetually holding the belligerents at arms' length via heavily militarized buffer zones? Is it possible to make peace self-enforcing at a reasonably low cost? Recent work on conflict management suggests not. Less intrusive approaches to mediation, such as information provision, fail to solve the problem that poses an obstacle to efficient negotiate between the belligerents in the first place. More intrusive approaches such as deploying armed peacekeepers are often successful, at least if they come after a...
Two CBS sitcoms have references Indiana Jones in the past couple of weeks: How I Met Your Mother invoked Last Crusade as Barney imagined that Ted and he entered the room where the grail and the fake grails were stored at the end of Last Crusade. The ghostly knight kept playing a role, telling Ted in "reality" that he was choosing poorly. Not a bad bit. Big Bang Theory had the Amy Farrah Fowler character bust a big plot hole in Raiders, arguing that Indiana Jones was unnecessary for the outcome. Whether he tried to stop the Nazis or not, they would have been killed by the power of the ark...