This post in the Bridging the Gap series comes from Peter Henne, Assistant Professor at the University of Vermont and a 2017 participant in BTG's International Policy Summer Institute. Earlier this week, Nikki Haley, the US Ambassador to the United Nations, announced...
CALL FOR PROPOSALS: "Game of Thrones and International Relations: Empirical Investigations" Deadline: May 26, 2014 Dan Drezner and I seek paper abstracts for an International Studies Association...
Dan Nexon has instituted a new Ask the Editors feature on his editor's blog on the newly revamped ISQ website. If you haven't seen it yet, PTJ has done a great job developing the site and Dan hasn't...
Editor's note: this post first appeared on my personal blog. 1. Tensions in the South China Sea are rising. Exhibit A (h/t Sean B. Rogers), exhibit B (h/t Jay Ulfelder). Right now, all eyes are on...
Morning! Check out Reed Wood's post at Political Violence @ a Glance on the lack of improvement in core physical integrity rights over time. It's not just the Political Terror Scale, either - the Physical Integrity Index from Cingranelli and Richards (CIRI) Human Rights Dataset shows the same lack of improvement over time. Update: Check out K. Chad Clay's take on the issue at The Quantitative Peace.
Below, the latest volley in the blog wars between the Human Security Report Project authors and their critics. _______________________________ Guest Post by Andrew Mack We thank Amelia Hoover Green, Dara Kay Cohen and Elizabeth Jean Wood (henceforth GCW) for their thoughtful critique of the Human Security Report’s analysis of the impact of war on the incidence of sexual violence. As we made clear in the Report, we believe that Dara Cohen’s dataset, which relies on State Department reports on human rights violations, makes an important contribution to our understanding of wartime sexual...
Welcome, Venezuela and Hugo Chávez, to a seat on the UN Human Rights Council. The US also won a seat. Worth noting, Hugo’s seat wasn’t contested but the seat the US won was contested. Don’t worry, though, Council may just be there for “rhetorical inaction.” Or, maybe it does more than that. And, new members on the Russian domestic human rights council, too. Seems like more of before. In case you are still interested in US election prediction, check out the awesome work of Emory political scientist Drew Linzer. Drew, is it too soon to predict 2016? Nifty new email trick (wish I had...
A strong correlation between cooperation and membership in international institutions is not enough to establish that international institutions cause cooperation. If we're to claim that institutions matter, we need to at least identify mechanisms by which institutions might promote cooperation among actors who would otherwise be disinclined to cooperate with one another. The mere fact that such mechanisms can be articulated does not itself tell us whether the correlation is causal, but it lends a certain measure of plausible to causal interpretations that would otherwise be lacking....
My Facebook feed filled up this weekend with salutes to veterans. My friends were mostly Americans, and so most of these (indeed, I'd bet all of them) were tributes to U.S. soldiers. For Americans, of course, Sunday was Veterans Day, but for the British and others it was Remembrance Day. Remembrance Day--Armistice Day, as I think of it--is a more fitting holiday than Veterans Day. It asks us to remember something particularly awful and shattering, the war that the United States has largely forgotten: the war that an American president promised would end all wars. Every year at this time, I...
Good morning, Happy Veteran's Day. In this 100% Petraeus-free edition of morning linkage, we note: Paul Atwood, author of War and Empire: The American Way of Life, meditates critically on the meaning of Veteran's Day 2012. The Article 32 evidentiary hearing on Staff Sgt. Robert Bales revisits the horrific details of the five hour killing spree/alleged war crime that left 15 civilians dead including nine children. Witnesses, survivors, and family members in Afghanistan have been testifying via video-link. Prosecutors have failed to explain why Afghans have not been permitted to testify in...
No, we're not having avian problems. Rather, we know that our archives are littered with artifacts of conversion: visible code, weird blockquoting, and so on. So, the plea: if you come across anything like this, please email me with the post link so that I can edit it. After a few years, we might have most of the problems solved.
Rob Farley had me on "Foreign Entanglements" yesterday. I'm in "mellow mode," but at least we have hats! Links below: Heather Hurlburt looks at what the election says about US foreign-policy debates. Problem: something like 5% of the electorate gave a &!@ about national security when it came time to vote. Joshua Foust considers a "Chinese Kyrgyzstan." Raffaello Pantucci and Alexandros Petersen examine Chinese policy in Afghanistan. Dan Trombly reflects on "perpetual war." William Savedoff on impact evaluation of foreign aid. Have I mentioned how much it grates when someone refers to a...