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Constructivism and the tension within
My first post of the new year (hey, it is still January!) is a bit IR theory geek-ish, so apologies to readers who do not follow those arcane discussions. About two weeks ago I participated in a...
WHO is responsible for the failure on Ebola?
Nathan Paxton has a provocative post on The Monkey Cage where he suggests, among other things that the World Health Organization (WHO) is not to blame for the Ebola crisis. Rather, he lays the blame...
SOTU: Cyber What?
In last night’s State of the Union Address, President Obama briefly reiterated the point that Congress has an obligation to pass some sort of legislation that would enable cybersecurity to protect...
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Tiwesdæg: the Left-hand of Linkage
A new military study concludes that drone strikes are more deadly to civilians than those conducted by manned fighter craft. Keep in mind, however, that fighter pilots are the traditional elite in the USAF and the rise of drones and drone pilots has generated a lot of internal politics. More important: there's no indication that the study controlled for the kinds of missions being carried out by drones and by strike aircraft. Speaking of drones, here's Maj David J. Blair (Georgetown ABD) and Capt Nick Helms on "What's at Stake in the Remote Aviation Culture Debate." Cheryl Rofer is firmly in...
The Snowden Affair and International Hierarchy
Most of my public comments on Snowden have focused on how to evaluate his actions as a US citizen and someone entrusted with a high-level security clearance. Here I want to focus on an analytical concern--that of international hierarchy. I don't have a strong sense of the degree that other scholars associate me with the "new hierarchy studies," but a major theme of my work is that we are better off understanding crticial aspects of international relations as structured by patterns of super- and subordination than as anarchical. Indeed, my sense is that two of the most prominent advocates of...
From Snowden Crash to Anathem
Germany benefits from US signal intelligence. When we consider the widespread industrial espionage carried out by the Chinese, it is helpful to remember France's extensive track record of stealing secrets from its friends and neighbors.* Israel is a major espionage threat to the United States. The British collect a lot of intelligence on allies and adversaries, even if deploying fake rocks in Russia might not have been the best idea in the history of spying. Russian and Chinese spying should require little in the way of elaboration: they both engage in a lot of it. There's nothing unusual...
A Network Explanation for the Rise of Global Social Issues
I am delighted to report that as of last Friday at 7:02pm I have completed final revisions on my latest book manuscript. This culminates a project on issue neglect that started with my observations about children born of war, emerged as a theory of "agenda-vetting," and involved a detailed NSF-funded study of the rise and fall of issues in the human security network. It also includes detailed case studies on several norm-building campaigns I've been following since 2007: the campaign to make amends to civilians harmed in legitimate battle operations, the campaign to ban infant male...
Monday Morning Linkage
Hi Duck friends. Here are some links to start your week... Liao Yiwu served four years in prison for reciting his poem "Massacre" in memory of the 1989 Tienanmen Square protests. Â His horrifying prison memoir reminds us that "China remains a prison of the mind: prosperity without liberty." Â More importantly, the memoir show the ways in which the Leninist-capitalist Chinese system of government and economy is replicated inside the prison. Â The poet's memoir is a portrait of China painted in shit, but it is a rather telling portrait nonetheless. Mong Palatino argues that the trans-boundary...
The Society of Individuals
Although I have made many of the points I am about to make in comments posted on Phil's and Eric's posts about rational choice theory over the past week, what I want to do at this point is to pull the whole thing together and make clear just why I still maintain that rational choice theory -- and indeed, the broader decision-theoretical world of which rational choice theory constitutes just a particular, heavily-mathematized province -- endorses and naturalizes a form of selfishness that is ultimately corrosive of human community and detrimental to the very idea of moral action. This is not...
Sunnanæfen Linkage
Robert Lieber takes another swing at the declinism debate. Kyrgyzstan moves forward on evicting the US from Manas. US suspends Bangladesh's trade privileges. China shifts policy on the Dali Lama. Also commits combat troops to Mali. David Schorr on nuclear zero. And also: Kindred W. takes on Dan Drezner's critique of the foreign-policy commentariat. In case you missed it, the next stop for the giant yellow Duck is... Pittsburgh.
Graduate School After Peace Corps
In 1998, while I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador, I decided to apply for a PhD program in political science. I had no idea what I was doing. Though I had majored in political science at UNC-Chapel Hill, graduating in 1993, I had a limited understanding of the "discipline." I barely knew what journals were. I had limited access to information about programs, with no access to the internet on a regular basis (I had a dial-up connection once a month or so if I took a two hour bus ride). In the end, two of the four programs I applied to required prior Master's and I didn't get in to those...