If you haven’t yet seen the zone’s geography, here it is to the left, complete with its overlap with the Korean and Japanese zones. The most important conflict of course is over Senkaku, but Korea watchers will also note that the Ieodo submerged reef, which Korea...
This was a momentous week with the announcement of an interim deal on Iran's nuclear program. There were some critics to be sure of this effort, but I for one am hopeful that the six month effort to...
Given the intricacies of our job and the cushy lifestyle most academics live in, it disconcerting when academics use improper and incorrect analogies to describe the intricacies of their job. The...
What does any faculty member REALLY want for the holidays? It’s not a Lexus, it’s not jewelry, it’s a brand new revise-and-resubmit (R&R) manuscript. It’s really all that is on my list every...
Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs Rights groups criticize incendiary attacks in Syria. Important new report on Syrian child casualties. On corpse-counting in former war zones. "Terminator ethics" discussions among autonomous weapons proponents. Momentum among humanitarian stakeholders how to curb explosive violence. 972 Mag on tensions between animal rights and human rights movements. Time on how trauma journalism worsens relief efforts in the Phillipines. Killer Apps on US military basing and humanitarianism. Drone Wars Obama Administration is under fire again on drones after drones hit...
Two steps forward, two steps back. Just as three women completed training in the Marines for the first time- and as the US Military works to integrate women in to the combat arms, a top female US Colonel has lost her job because she asked for "average looking women" to be used in communications. Col. Lynette Arnhart had been leading the effort to open more infantry roles for women in the army by January 1 2016. Politico first broke this story, noting that Arnhart had recommended avoiding using attractive women in communications because: “In general, ugly women are perceived as competent...
Last week, I finally had the opportunity to read Lisa Martin’s recent piece on compliance entitled Against Compliance. Prof. Martin meticulously evaluates the literature on compliance and concludes that compliance is the wrong dependent variable to uncover the causal effect of international law on state behavior. Martin’s review of compliance studies is comprehensive and her analysis is sound. She correctly identifies the conceptual and empirical problems that continue to trouble compliance research. Against Compliance prompted me to rethink long and hard about compliance, and stars aligned...
It is time for an academic Thanksgiving (at least it is for me, flew home early because it was Reading Week in the UK), that time of year when we give thanks for when our ancestral academic Deans fed us when we were hungry. Something like that...cornucopia with grants, laptops, and travel funds. Who knows how it all started. Still, it is that time of year we all reflect on what we are thankful for. So what am I thankful for, as an academic? For one, I am thankful for Laura Sjoberg's contributions to the Duck of Minerva. She has not been posting regularly for some time but her...
I realize I am putting my Twitter standings at great risk by potentially appearing to make light of an important social issue.* But when I found this treatise on the importance of tighter regulations for dragons I couldn't resist sharing. Happy Friday! Game of Thrones - Dragon Control by TheShortsShow *Though I hate to disagree with anyone whose work I admire so greatly, and though no one can really argue with Katee Sakhoff's call for gun safety, as a political scientist I must say that Sakhoff is wrong on gun control. First, there is important evidence from experimental studies that on...
Following on my round of links on Thursday, this is a guest post from Jennifer Hadden from the University of Maryland who is in Warsaw at the global climate negotiations (follow her on Twitter here). Yeb Saño, Climate Change Commissioner of the Philippines, opened the annual negotiations of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change last week by making an emotional appeal to delegates to "stop the madness" and act decisively on climate change. As of Thursday evening, there have been two three walkouts by the G77/China on the issue of 'loss and damage' and a substantial and broad-based...
The annual climate negotiations are going on at the moment in Warsaw, Poland. For long-time observers of the process, they have a Groundhog Day-esque quality to them. Every year the same issues seem to come up again and again, and it's unclear if there has been any meaningful progress or if each negotiation is more or less a replay of what transpired the previous year, with divisions between developed and developing countries almost always ever-present. Rich countries aren't doing enough while poor countries and environmental activists are demanding greater action because there is a climate...
As has been widely reported in the Western media, on Friday, China’s state media finally officially announced two changes in human rights policies: (a) an end of the “Laojiao” policy of “re-education through labor” and (b) a change in the one-child policy in China, allowing two children per family if at least one of the parents was a single child (before both parents had to be only children). Other, somewhat underreported, changes coming from the same official media report about the Third Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China included a reduction of...