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...
The reports about the bilateral agreement between the US and Afghanistan that would allow American troops (and other western countries essentially) have suggested that President Hamid Karzai would...
My new job as semi-weekly Tuesday linker is off to an uneven start. I am behind on link collection as I was roaming this past weekend in the cell phone sense--in the US where my cell phone is...
The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots secured an important victory last week when delegates of States Parties to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) voted unanimously to take up the...
Here are a few articles for your consideration. For those of you interested in conservation, we have had a disturbing pattern of stories about rapid declines in species around the world, some of them due to poaching, what has been described as an "environmental crime wave," and others as a result of disease. All of this suggests to me that nature is in serious trouble as population, disruptive modernity, and consumptive pressures may be taking their toll on the natural world. On top of existing stories about declines in elephants, rhinos, bees, bats, and amphibians, we now have reports of a...
It is shocking how little attention Iran’s recent efforts to satisfy the international community’s demands on nuclear question have received in the news media and academic discourse. As I write this, there are 1182 related news stories on news.google.com related to Rob Ford’s struggles with the crack cocaine and only 85 related to Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Prepping for my graduate course on IR Theory, it struck me how little we talk about the process of desecuritization. The securitization process is well covered, we often are able to analyse, describe, and deconstruction the process...
Two pieces got emailed to me in the last few days that nicely illustrate just how entrenched semi-imperial thinking has become in Washington, how wildly disconnected from the reality of US security our foreign policy community’s threat assessments have become, and the hysteria that greets serious debate on DoD’s size in this post-Great Recession era of high unemployment and large deficits. This, by good-journalist-turned-disturbing-militarist Robert Kaplan, and this, by the ‘Iraq was a victory’ crowd at AEI. Here’s Kaplan: “The bottom may be starting to fall out of the U.S. defense budget. I...
Lionel Beehner and Joseph Young write in The National Interest that while targeted killing by drone strike is increasingly denounced (and decreasingly used by states), cross-border incursions by counter-terror ground troops are an increasingly accepted practice – despite the fact that both violate state sovereignty. Citing the capture of Abu Anas Al-Libi by US special ops in Libya, drug kingpins by Brazil in Bolivia and Peru, and the frequency of cross-border incursions in Africa, they express surprise that not all violations of sovereignty are equally frowned upon, and explain this based on...
The year 2014 is nearly on us, and reflections on World War One are already weighing down bookshop shelves. In my own research, I've stumbled across an odd tendency: that whereas in Britain the cause of World War One, if not its conduct, attracts strong supporters as well as critics, the first Gulf War is remembered as a bit of a disappointment. Consider the difference with one of history's archetypal 'limited' wars, which few seem keen to defend. In early 1991, having defeated the fourth largest army in the world after a bombing campaign and 100 hours of ground war, President Bush I called...
As part of World Politics Review's new feature on "winding down the war on terror," I rant about the US' continuing use of a war paradigm for global law enforcement operations: The term “shadow wars” aptly describes the U.S. approach to the war on terror. Policymakers perceive they are fighting an enemy composed of shadow and dust, one hidden in and facilitated by the dark underworld of global politics. But to prosecute this campaign, the U.S. has itself, to borrow a term from the writer J.R.R. Tolkien, “fallen into shadow”: Its moral high ground and once-principled politics have been...
This is my first time doing the Duck linkage, as I will be alternating with Charli on Tuesdays. I may eventually figure out a style, a pattern, a focus, but my first shot at this will be either completely random or entirely typical of my various fascinations and interests. As I panic every other Monday night, y'all can send me suggests via twitter (@smsaideman). Now to the links with probably too much explanation attached: IR Stuff Over the weekend, there was a story about a supposed crisis in US Civil-Military relations. Luckily, the folks at Outside the Beltway de-bunked it quickly. For...
I left academia because I wanted to make a difference. I went to graduate school for the normal reasons: I’d done well in school, I didn’t really want to get a job, and I needed to learn how to free my mother from the eternal torments of the demon Mephisto. For a while, everything was great. I slept in, worked late, and made excellent ramen. I loved being a part of the laboratory: running experiments, writing up results, and especially making charts. (Someone lent me a copy of Tufte’s book on data visualization--it changed my life!) I even liked teaching, unlike a lot of researchers. Part of...