One of the most poignant moments of Barack Obama’s presidency was his eulogy for those murdered in the massacre at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. In the pulpit of that historic black church that served as a civil rights era sanctuary, and...
Greetings readers! And apologies for my slap-happy blogging record of late. Among my several resolutions this year is a return to blogging at the rate of at minimum one substantive post per week, in...
I really like the point of this brief little article on a “cyber attack” against a power plant. The money quote highlighted from the Foreign Policy article, “A shooter could get 200 yards away with...
One week left for nominations. Please send us your nominations -- you can email us a nomination directly or post in the Comments thread below. Here's what we have so far for each category: Best...
With the UNSC approval of the NFZ+ and the announcement of a cease-fire by the Libyan government, a slaughter in eastern Libya may have been averted. I don't want to weigh in on the NFZ+ as other Ducks are much more qualified to discuss the potential strategic and diplomatic challenges ahead. I did however want to flag a few scattered items about the rebels themselves and purported links with foreign patrons which some readers may have missed and which might inform a discussion of the conflict which is still far from over...First, Andrew Exum wrote on his blog (3/10/11) at CNAS,"On a per...
About a month ago, the symposium on my book over at The Disorder of Things that I mentioned in an earlier post reached a critical stage: posts by Paul, Joe, Nick, and Meera were up, and it was now my turn. And then life intervened, and lo and behold it's been almost a month and I haven't put up a reply. I finally got a chance to start work on a reply this weekend, but it's grown so large in conception that I am going to have to split it into three parts. The first part is below the fold in this post; the second and third parts will follow shortly, depending -- in all honesty -- on how much...
Dan and I spent the last few days in London doing a variety of talks that might be of some interest to the general Duck readership.On Wednesday I gave a book talk at SOAS; I'm quite pleased at the way this one turned out. Podcast here; q and a here. And the sci-fi author part of the session is available to listen to here.On Thursday Dan and I participated in the LSE's Literary Festival on a pair of roundtables entitled "Science Fiction an International orders." Liveblog by Stephanie (as most of you probably already know) here; my contribution podcast here; Dan's contribution here.On Friday...
India has soft power to the extent that its values, its way of managing its affairs and its vision for the international system are so attractive to other nations that the latter start doing what India wants without India having to use the sticks and carrots of traditional international relations. By achieving relatively stable democracy in such a geographically large and religiously diverse polity, for instance, India may inspire others to emulate its institutions. Nevertheless, to understand Indian soft power, we must first ask how others see India. Indian soft power is a function of...
I do not see the discussions about zombies as a type of new or out-of-the-box thinking. If anything, the discussions of zombies that I have noted so far are completely "in-the-box" thinking, except with a touch of geeky humor, parody, and wit that is usually lacking in the discipline. In fact, the discourse seems to consist mainly of exercises in applying existing theoretical tools to an impossible scenario for pedagogical purposes or to lampoon the generally stale pedagogy of IR theory. From my perspective, the question is not how well or fairly does this exercise treat particular...
I’ve just finished reading Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History and would highly recommend it to those interested in rights and norms. I have written a review of it that will eventually appear in the American Historical Review. Meanwhile, for those who just can't wait, my main points: Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia is an erudite and impressive intellectual history, portraying the core principle of contemporary human rights--that individual rights transcend state sovereignty--as a strikingly recent invention. . . .Moyn argues that early views of rights were welded to the...
On 4 June 2009 US President Obama went to Cairo to make a speech to the Muslim world, where, among other things, he addressed the question of political reform and democracy in the Middle East. In February 2011 one Al-Jazeera columnist has associated the tumultuous changes in Egypt and Tunisia to the persuasive technique Inception, the film in which Leonardo DiCaprio tries to plant ideas in individuals’ minds by infiltrating their dreams. Larbi Sadiki writes, ‘A precedent has been set in Tunisia, and Egypt is on the move. Whilst the challenges are awesome, the seeds for planting democratic...
Apparently separate and relatively peaceful revolutions have now toppled dictatorial regimes in two North African states. What provoked these events? While there are a wide range of political and economic factors as well as organizations that had been building for years, the proximate causes that triggered the call for protests were quite similar.A cartoon by Carlos Latuff depicting the lateKhaled Said's revenge on President Hosni MubarakThe trigger for both events can be traced to two individuals. The outrage that started the January 25th revolution in Egypt was the brutal death of a 28...