The following is a guest post by Sidra Hamidi, a PhD Candidate in Political Science at Northwestern University, specializing in global nuclear politics and state identity. She has published previously in the Washington Post and E-International Relations. In the...
Hi, Ducks! Happy New Year! I'm back after a semester wandering across northern India. Did you miss me? Well, here are your links anyway... Professor Ole Wæver argues for "open science to fight...
What is better than one Nazi Zombie movie? Two of them! Yes, we have a sequel:
We're going to kick of 2014 right with our morning linkage. I'd like to say the stories coming out from around the world are festive and joyful, but I suppose the habit in the profession is to be...
In the tradition of the satirical website, Stuff White People Like, I offer you the first installment of Stuff Political Scientists Like, which I will offer in irregular installments if political scientists like it. This seemed only appropriate since in the words of the author of that website: "It is important to note that a high percentage of white people also get degrees in Political Science, which is pretty much like arts, and only seems to have the word “science” in it to make white people feel better about themselves."Political scientists like "original datasets." The topic is really...
In the latest attempt to project its "soft power" in South Asia, the US government has approved a $20 million project to bring a local adaptation of Sesame Street to Pakistan. Time magazine notes:"'The idea is to prepare and inspire a child to go on the path of learning,' said Faizaan Peerzada, a collaborator on the Pakistani version of the show. "This is a very serious business, the education of the children of Pakistan at a critical time." Their main messages will be of acceptance and empowerment, to sway youngsters away from religious extremism and promote growth."The Guardian writes that...
In prepping for a fortuitously timely class session on humanitarian intervention, I reread Madeline Albright's op-ed from 2008 on the "end of intervention." The claim, which I bought at the time, was that the perceived illegitimacy of the Iraq War had resuscitated the norm of state sovereignty, which had taken some hits since the end of the Cold War. Implicit in the piece was that the invasion of Iraq had disillusioned formerly "liberal hawks," particularly as Bush's rhetoric had been so instrumentally idealistic. I never bought that neoconservatives are really concerned about human rights....
UK Movie Poster for "Monsters" (2010). Source: Wikipedia.The post-9/11 generation sci-fi film "Monsters" (Gareth Edwards, 2010) is a kind of "Cloverfield" for the US-Mexican border (or if you're a real film buff, it is a "Sin Nombre" journey film with real aliens, i.e. gigantic extra-terrestials). But this is more than just a monster flick.The film takes the notion of a militarized zone and an alien invasion along the US-Mexican border quite literally, but it is set six years after the invasion or infestation. Thus, Mexico is transformed into a late-Occupied Iraq or Afghanistan and Texas...
We're sorry...That some of our soldiers publicly refer to your people in derogatory and racist language.That some of our soldiers shoot your unarmed civilians at random, defile their corpses, and cut off body parts to keep as trophies.That some of our soldiers killed the cousin of your head of state. We didn't even know we were in the hometown of the President, how could we have known he was a Karzai? Oh, right.. we're very sorry.That our helicopter pilots slaughtered your children while they are out collecting firewood. That argument we made about how using attack helicopters instead of...
The release of the first three of a reported 4,000 photos and videos from an American "kill team" in Afghanistan threatens to become the next "Abu Ghraib." The horrific images of civilian corpses being photographed with grinning American troops raises important questions about the American military's ability to maintain professional standards and discipline; soldiers' (racialized) understanding of and ability to engage with foreign societies; and the underside of military culture. In other words, contrary to the military's spin machine, these images are not an aberration or simply the...
Saudi APCs and Emirati troops are now on the streets of Bahrain attempting to squelch what was formerly a non-violent, secular, youth-led, economically rooted, democracy movement as America does little other than urge restraint from its allies. Such mealy mouthed statements toward a regime which is using live ammunition against unarmed protesters and then denying the victims of its rampage access to medical facilities indicates that the US foreign policy establishment has failed to adapt its posture toward authoritarian client regimes since the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. Consequently,...
I was fortunate enough to participate in an ISA panel yesterday morning entitled "The Third Generation of Constructivist Thought: Boundaries, Distinctions, Limits -- Social Theory, Philosophy, and Constructivism," organized by Benjamin Herborth and Oliver Kessler. I decided to take the opportunity to deliver a little sermon on the counterproductive enterprise of trying to sharply define "constructivism" as a single coherent theory of anything, let alone a single coherent theory of world politics. Podcast here; the basic summary of my claim, along with my replies to some audience questions...