The Ebola crisis isn't over. In the absence of new infections in the United States, Americans have moved on to other preoccupations (Ferguson anyone?), but the problem hasn't gone away even if Google searches have plunged. There has been some positive news out of...
In May of 2014, the United Nations Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW) first considered the issue of banning lethal autonomous weapons. Before the start of the informal expert meetings, Article...
As a very frequent tweeter, I could only watch this SNL sketch/dance number (didn't make it to the show, just to dress rehearsal) with just a hint of shame:
On November 3, Britain’s head of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) published an opinion piece in the Financial Times, noting that technology companies, such as Twitter, Facebook,...
Check out this set of tweets tying together feminism and Princess Bride. My guess is that you check out #feministprincessbride you will find many more. The movie keeps on giving.
Yesterday, I was part of a panel at Carleton organized to provide other profs/students with suggestions about how to get their stuff published in book form. The Canadian process is different from the American process, so I spent my ten minutes on the lessons I learned from my experiences with American publishers. What did I say? Read stuff for style, not just content. If you want to know how to write a good book that is publishable, notice the books you like and how they are written, not just what they say. One of the panelists discussed how many different kinds of books there are:...
Here was my Tweet the other day. Today we have an answer. Tweeps, best case scenario on climate coming out of APEC? — Josh Busby (@busbyj2) November 7, 2014 If you went to bed early on Tuesday night, you might have missed some very big news out of Obama-Xi meeting in Beijing, other than announcements on trade and regional security. I'm talking about the potentially momentous bilateral agreement on climate change where China announced for the first time a date -- "around 2030" -- for peak greenhouse gas emissions and the United States announced a 2025 emissions reduction target. This is big...
Among the various things I've read in the run-up to Veterans Day / Remembrance Day is this article by University of Auckland's Tom Gregory, entitled, "Body Counts Disguise The True Horror of What Wars Do to Bodies": "Relying on these statistics alone may provide us with a brief glimpse at the suffering of those affected, but it ends up concealing the violence it is supposed to expose. When dealing only with numbers, we tend to lose sight of the bodies that are left broken by the machinery of war, along with the individuals who are busy living and dying on the battlefield." This is an...
I was remiss yesterday in failing to note that November 9, 2014 would have been Carl Sagan's 80th birthday. For a former astrophysicist such as myself, it is an opportunity for reflection on the significance of what we do in the study and practice of international relations. Sagan was a masterful communicator of important scientific ideas to the public. One of the lessons of cosmology he was so effective, and persistent, in communicating was the tenuousness of humanity's existence. Earth orbits a nondescript star in the relative hinter regions of a nondescript galaxy, one of more than...
Today 25 years ago the Berlin Wall was torn down, one of the most consequential events of the 20th Century, catalyst for the end of the Cold War and freedom for millions stuck behind the Iron Curtain yanked down on them by the USSR. I was a student just starting to get interested in the wider world. I grew jealous of a couple of friends who were able to be there…in Berlin…dancing on the wall with the Germans…a seminal moment, which I watched on TV like everyone else. I got there as soon as I could, once finals were over. With a guy from my hostel who had a hammer, we warily approached a...
Last week, the Economist reported on the expanding sway of Christianity in China. While the numbers are difficult to pin down, The Economist reports that some argue that the number of Christians in China exceeds the number of official members of the Chinese Communist Party (87 million). What we are witnessing in China then is a dramatic shift in the constitution of domestic social systems in China as religion in general and Christianity in particular increasingly inform conceptions of what it means to be ‘Chinese’ and the accompanying systems of meaning. From the vantage point of many...
In For Kin or Country, the basic idea is to explain a set of policies that is always expensive. When one tries to take the territory of another country, there tends to be a response. While folks dismissed Obama's line about Putin's moves having a cost, it turns out that he was right. These costs come, as always, in two forms: political and economic. Thanks to both our friend the security dilemma and due to the domestic dynamics of the target, there are reactions. If Russia thought it was being encircled before, it will certainly feel so now. Some are calling for containment part two (or...