Professor Julie Kaarbo (U. of Edinburgh) discusses role theory, the relationship between FPA and IR theory, and a new project she is calling Breaking Bad. As always thanks go to Steve Dancz (https://stevedancz.com) for our theme music.
I never thought that when I started grad school I’d be relocating to another country. Then again, when I got the job in Canada, it did not really occur to me that I was “really” leaving the US – on...
In the Greek bailout episode the Greek government has been behaving much like the self-pitying Antonio from “The Merchant of Venice,” while the EU has been posing as a rather heavy-handed Shylock....
After you have seen the fall foliage at ISS-ISAC, why not see beautiful St. Louis, MO in November? ISA-Midwest - my FAVORITE conference - is November 19th - 22nd. Deadline for submissions is July...
I am on vacation so I am a bit late with the FNB. This 2014 film looks like a heap of fun--when superhero impersonators stop impersonating and start hero-ing:
Hey, y'all... Here's your linkage... Enjoy. Kapil Patel argues that a growing awareness of India's declining conventional deterrence vis-a-vis China has led it to create a new mountain strike corps of 40,000 men. Alec Metz at Registan reviews this year's Eid message from the sub-literate but charismatic Mullah Muhammad Omar. Ajit Sahi argues that despite the very significant flare-up in Indo-Pak tensions last week along the Line of Control, India needs to engage more, not less, with Pakistan to end the conflict. Buddhist-Muslim violence has flared in Sri Lanka as the Myanmar conflict...
Over at the National Interest T.X. Hamnes has a nice critique of AirSea Battle, seemingly the Pentagon's reigning strategy…sorry, operational concept...for dealing with a rising China and the problem of Anti-Access/Area Denial (for the official overview, see here). I expect I’ll be writing a bit on ASB during my time at the Duck, so I won’t try to engage in every debate in the first post. For now I’ll limit myself to one question Hamnes raises: does it make any sense to talk about an operational concept as isolated from strategy? Some quick background. The argument that ASB is an...
Apologies for the delay in Thursday linkage but was a bit under the weather. It's the Texas heat, making me crazy and violent, or at least so suggests a recent empirical study in Science though it has its detractors. This week, I link to the back and forth of a major study on climate and conflict that carries out a meta-analysis of 60 studies and finds a 1 standard deviation change in variety of climate indicators leads to a 4% rise in "interpersonal violence" and a 14% rise in "intergroup" violence. "Quantifying the Influence of Climate on Human Conflict", Science, Hsiang et al., 2013 More...
It’s almost APSA time and it seems all my friends are busy planning really wonderful sporting engagements for times they aren’t in panels. This always puts me in a bind – I thought we became academics because we were bad at sports! I can’t throw a Frisbee and soccer requires too much coordination. So, I’ve compiled a list of the fun and somewhat aerobic things I plan to do at APSA, none of which require much coordination but all of which provide some thrill if carried out correctly: Push all the buttons in the Palmer House Hilton elevator. Bonus points for doing this 5 minutes before a...
In all the media frenzy over “killer robots,” Terminator imagery comes up a lot. So do references to Battlestar Galactica. So does a specific scene from Robocop, soon to be remade to resonate with public fears of domestic drones. These iconic narratives invoke a recurrent theme in American science fiction about lethal robot malfunctions or uprisings against their human creators. So prevalent is this theme in anti-killer-robot media coverage that some have argued concern over autonomous weapons is a product of science fiction itself: Hollywood is apparently to blame for priming the public...
At least since the Copenhagen summit of 2009, global climate negotiations have stalled. Both academic researchers and policy analysts have recently emphasized the need to develop innovative strategies to break the negotiation gridlock. One such argument is that if major emitters show 'leadership' by adopting ambitious national policies, they can build trust and move the negotiations forward. This argument was recently made in a joint report authored by Terry Townshend and Adam C.T. Matthews for the Climate & Development Knowledge Network and GLOBE International. They argue that...
Yesterday, four Neo-Nazis were finally sentenced for their roles in a series of brutal killings of Roma families in Hungary in 2008 and 2009. Although the convictions have been applauded as a human rights victory, advocates are still demanding that Hungary steps up to the plate and protects the rights of Roma, a historically at-risk minority. The killings were not isolated events against Roma in Hungary; other discriminatory actions have been occurring, without punitive consequences, for quite some time. Why are Roma still discriminated against in Hungary? Hungary is an EU state. The...