For Russia watchers Christmas always comes early (or Hanukkah comes right on time!) when Putin gives his annual presser in mid-December to the journalists from Russia and around the world. This year was no exception, and Putin provided an almost 4-hour spectacle of...
Greetings from Toronto. In advance of tonight's OAIS blogging awards gathering at 7:15pm in Sheraton Ballroom C, the Duck non-collective collective got together for a pre-soiree soiree. Folks were...
As the gods of the International Studies Association have seen fit to place my panel at 8:15 on a Saturday morning, I decided to advertise my talk in the blogosphere in hopes of drumming up some...
This activity comes after students are to have listened to a lecture (slides) introducing the second big puzzle of the course: why states sometimes burn what they want in order to get more of...
Michael Horowitz and Philip Tetlock have an interesting piece in Foreign Policy that examines the record on long-range forecasting of global events -- 15 - 20 years into the future. They acknowledge the inherent difficulties of such a projections, but still wonder:whether there are not ways of doing a better job -- of assigning more explicit, testable, and accurate probabilities to possible futures. Improving batting averages by even small margins means the difference between runner-ups and World Series winners -- and improving the accuracy of probability judgments by small margins could...
It's time for the annual Asian multilateral alphabet soup round up... Long story short: APEC's proposed Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific (FTAAP), the US backed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and the Chinese backed Tripartite Agreement all appear to have lost some of their thunder to the ASEAN+6's decision to begin negotiating the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) next year.In fact, if the ASEAN+6 negotiations are substantively successful and not riddled with exceptions clauses it will create the largest economic bloc in the world, the Asian Economic Community (AEC), by...
This is my final post about NK; here is one, two, and three. The post title comes from a remark a local guide made to me, and that is the standard KIS image in the pic.7. The Korean People’s Army is pretty much everywhere.This is easily the most militarized state I’ve ever been in. Soldiers and other uniformed military are everywhere, and units of KPA were doing all sorts of even banal things, like going to the Pyongyang fun fair, together en bloc. Guards carried automatic weapons openly in public with disturbing frequency. And the KPA was pretty clearly a captive, exploited labor force....
There is KJI in the middle – he was even born in uniform Actually, he was probably born in the USSR during the war. Here are parts one and two of this series. 5. Pyongyang the Potemkin Village? The usual line is that Pyongyang is a potemkin village compared to the rest of the country. I can’t say, but I think so. Unfortunately, we only saw the capital, Nampo, and the Mt. Paektu area. And what we saw was quite controlled of course. We were told at certain points that we were not allowed to photograph out the bus windows. But honestly, I didn’t see any extreme poverty. I certainly didn’t see...
I have 50+ similar pictures of me standing with KIS murals, statues, busts...I went to NK this summer. In my first post, I noted how NK should probably be re-named Kim-land. Here are some more impressions:1.a. Kim Jong Un was not so emphasized.In passing, it is worth noting that KJU was not stressed that much. At the Arirang games, portraits of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il were put up, but not KJU. Nor did we see any images of him at all. No portraits or murals. There were a few slogans using his names, but no imagery anywhere. We were told that is because of his modesty. He does not want to...
My North Korean VisaIn August, I visited North Korea for the first time. It was the most unique travelling experience I’ve ever had. I’d certainly recommend it to political scientists and Asia experts, but it wasn’t anything close to a ‘vacation’ or break or anything like that. (Yes, some of the sites marketing tours of NK actually call it that.)At a bookstore devoted to the works of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, I stumbled across an essay, from the latter if I remember correctly, about social scientists’ commitment to the revolution and juche. It included the title line – that we must avoid...
Dear Leader Kim Jong Un addresses the ruling partyI didn't watch the Republican Convention last night, because I'm not getting paid to do so. I understand that conservatives think it was a hit and liberals a travesty, although the Romney-Ryan campaign's invocation of AC/DC to prove their cool guy credentials strongly suggests the latter.So it wasn't until I read Kevin Drum's blog post this morning that I saw this section of Congressman Ryan's speech:College graduates should not have to live out their 20s in their childhood bedrooms, staring up at fading Obama posters and wondering when they...
With the loss of the drinking intellectual stimulation that comes from APSA, I'm in need of some inspiration to kick start the semester that begins next week. We all know that academic life is full of adventure, comedy, human drama, and conflict. So, it shouldn't be too difficult to find a decent Hollywood movie about academic life. Lucky Jim should be a shoe-in, but the 1957 film is just bad. Wonder Boys ranks high because Michael Douglas looks good in a pink robe, and in a rarity for this genre, actually refuses to sleep with his student. A Beautiful Mind isn't really about academic life,...