Late last month the New York Times ran an interesting piece about the power of language and climate change. Central to the story is the concept of a carbon budget. On its face, the concept is simple. Drawing on complex models of the atmospheric and energy effects of...
I just read David Edelstein and Ron Krebs' provocative piece ($) in Foreign Affairs on how the practice of grand strategy leads to threat inflation. One section struck me as somewhat problematic in...
The controversy surrounding the coalition airstrike in Kunduz continues to rumble on this week after military investigators drove an armoured personnel carrier into a hospital’s front gate. A...
Like most Canadian citizens, I was delighted to see the back end of our former Prime Minister Harper as he conceded defeat to the Liberal Party's Justin Trudeau. Although I've felt slightly...
Yesterday I had the great fortune to sit on a faculty panel discussing the Iran nuclear deal put on by my colleagues at Georgia Tech [I will link to the video when it is available]. A logic of thought that came up, in different formulations, related to the idea that the nuclear deal might transform US-Iran relations and/or change Iran’s domestic politics. Coincidentally, the New York Times reported yesterday the answer is apparently a resounding no from the Ayatollah Khamenei--Iran would not be having anything more to do with the US lest the Great Satan "sneak back in through the window." ...
The following is a guest post by Margaret Peters, who teaches political economy and migration at Yale University. She is currently finishing her book project When Business Abandoned Immigration: Firms and the Remaking of Globalization." Recent pictures of Syrian refugee crisis from 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi lying dead on a beach in Turkey to migrants sitting in camps in Hungary have increased the calls for the West to “do something.” Instead of doing the easiest, most effective, and least expensive thing to protect Syrians (and other refugees) – allowing them to enter and stay in wealthy...
Over on my Facebook feed, there's a good discussion going on about Adam Elkus' "The Problem of Bridging the Gap." Elkus' post amounts to, quite deliberately, a medium-length polemic against "policy relevance." That is, he aims to provoke. For example, Elkus argues that: It judges the value of academic inquiry from the perspective of whether or not it concords with the values, aims, preferences, and policy concerns and goals of a few powerful elites. Why, if anything, do we judge “policy relevance” by whether or not it helps governmentpolicy elites? Surely governmental elites, politicians,...
I don't attend the American Political Science Conference these days (I explained why in this post last year). But many of my colleagues do, so every year at this time I participate vicariously by watching what is going on in my Facebook feed. Yesterday, I was surprised by Page Fortna's status update which read as follows: A new mom attending APSA was denied entry to the book room today because she had her 9 week old with her. They claimed insurance doesn't cover babies. WTF APSA? Family-unfriendly much That's right: as if it's not enough already to face childhood as a "polisci brat," now...
* Please note: I absolutely oppose publishing the image of Aylan Kardi on this website* Since my name is mentioned- and our short twitter exchange highlighted in Annick's previous post as potentially the inspiration point for her piece- I feel I need say something. First, I'll acknowledge that the image we are debating hit me somewhere deep because the boy is the same size and age as my son. Those points of connection made me look at the image differently and that difference in how I saw the image made me feel embarrassed, upset, and unsure what it meant about how I saw the whole 'package'...
Yesterday the picture of little Alan (previously identified as Aylan), lying dead in the sand on the shores of the Mediterranean, circled the world. It provoked strong reactions from those who 'witnessed' his death in this manner and, not unlike the debates following some of the images shared after 9/11 (I wrote about that then), people questioned the ethics of sharing the images particularly without warning (see replies by some who shared here, here & here and note that his father wants the image to be shared if it can provoke action). Indeed, it was this tweet from fellow Duck Megan...
We are witnessing the horror of war. We see it every day, with fresh pictures of refugees risking their lives on the sea, rather than risking death by shrapnel, bombs, assassination or enslavement. For the past four years, over 11 million Syrians have left their homes; 4 million of them have left Syria altogether. Each day thousands attempt to get to a safer place, a better life for themselves and their children. Each day, the politics of resettlement and the fear of terrorism play their part. The last major resettlement campaign in the US came after the Vietnam War. Over a 20-year period 2...
I just got out of a half-day APSA pre-conference short course on the politics of markets, firms, and interest groups organized by the sociologist Edward Walker and political scientist Patty Strach. Having attended Thad Dunning's short course on natural experiments in the past, I think there is a lot to be said for alternative formats to the traditional panel of papers and discussants. This morning, 9 panelists each reflected on a common set of questions with two discussants, Ed and David Vogel, weighing in on our remarks. Fellow panelists including a number of folks who study American...