This is a guest post (begun as a series of tweets) by Phil Orchard, Senior Lecturer in Peace and Conflict Studies and International Relations at the University of Queensland and the Research Director of the Asia-Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect. He is...
Dan Levine sent on this great write up of the Israeli Defense Force’s (IDF) problems with social media. A few highlights: “In 2010, a soldier in the artillery corps posted this status: “Cleaning up...
Will this morning's links betray my grumpiness? I hope not but today's meme that the US and the West are in danger of losing Ukraine drives me a bit crazy. It wasn't in my pocket... was it in...
This fifth activity comes after students are to have listened to lectures about coordination (slides) and collaboration (slides) problems. I led off with a coordination problem that might not have...
I have been asked to revise and resubmit an article submitted for an IR journal. But it’s a big r&r; the editor even said it would be “a great deal of work” (groan). While I must make the changes to the ms, I must also submit a letter to the editors and reviewers to explain my changes. That’s normal of course, but I wonder how the community would appraise the proper length of a letter to the editor for a major r&r? In my last r&r, thankfully a minor, I wrote 2-3 pages. But for a major r&r that “needs a great deal of work'’, I was thinking around 10 pages. Is that too much?...
The keynote address for this year's NITLE Symposium was delivered by Dan Cohen, a major voice in the "digital humanities" movement and one of the leading figures behind Zotero, the open-source free EndNote killer research tool. Cohen outlined a vision of 'Net-enabled scholarly publishing that I can only think to call the aggregation model: editorial committees scanning the 'Net to find the most interesting scholarly content in a given field or discipline, and highlighting it through websites and e-mail blasts that hearken back to the early days when weblogs were literally just collections of...
This is a shameless bleg to two different audiences.The first, and immediately more important, is undergraduate students who might like to take a serious course about international relations, political science, and science fiction this summer. During the first summer term, I'm picking up Dan's section of Government 310: Interstellar Relations.The second, and closely related, audience is the readers of this blog, to whom I turn to help improve my syllabus. I wanted to do something a little different than Dan or PTJ's version. Summers here are shorter than the semester, and I wanted the...
Jennifer Lind has a good piece up on Foreign Affairs this week on why NK seems to regularly get away with with hijinks like last week’s rocket test (which directly contravenes UN Resolution 1874). She notes, correctly, that NK has been pulling unanswered, wild stunts like this for years – shootouts in the Yellow Sea, nuclear tests, kidnappings, etc. Further, the US particularly tends to hit back when hit. Indeed, looking at the GWoT, America’s problem is over-reaction rather than passivity. If we look at the Israelis, it’s similar. They have a well-established reputation of hitting back,...
Kindred Winecoff has a pretty sweet rebuttal to my ill-tempered rant of late March. A lot of it makes sense, and I appreciate reading graduate student's perspective on things. Some of his post amounts to a reiteration of my points: (over)professionalization is a rational response to market pressure, learning advanced methods that use lots of mathematical symbols is a good thing, and so forth. On the one hand, I hope that one day Kindred will sit on a hiring committee (because I'd like to see him land a job). On the other hand, I'm a bit saddened by the prospect because his view of the...
<img src="https://lh3.ggpht.com/-lXf905vas9I/T4Zfu5yVCwI/AAAAAAAAAJg/Cgr7ZRk41Cg/videoefa933ead93d%25255B3%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" style="border-style: none" galleryimg="no" onload="var downlevelDiv = document.getElementById('6321b8cf-9761-4208-8fea-48b2a79cce22'); downlevelDiv.innerHTML = "";" alt="" />Dancing for Votes in Dongnae! Because I work for a public university, I am a national civil servant. So it was inappropriate for me to comment on my site about the recent Korean parliamentary election. But now that it’s over (here are...
Here is part one, where I argued that Kim’s rise scrambles our conventional wisdom on NK, opening a lot of unexpected room, at least early in his tenure, to try to deal. The cold war stand-off in Korea is now so bad, that there is little to lose in trying to talk with him, and it would seem like a huge missed opportunity to simply blow him off as identically awful to his father. For my regular argument that negotiating with Kim Jong Il was impossible, try here and here (or if you’d rather just read about the ridiculous Homefront video game, try this).The tentative ‘Leap Day deal,’ from the...
Though my ISA experience was indeed interrupted both by an ultimate game and a nasty case of the flu, rumors of my disappearance have been wildly exaggerated. A travel-intensive Friday day plus a kid-intensive Saturday are all that have impeded timely nerd blogging this week. It won't happen often.