The following is a guest post by Jahara W. Matisek. Jahara “FRANKY” Matisek is a Major in the U.S. Air Force, with plenty of combat experience flying the C-17 and an instructor pilot tour in the T-6. He is an AFIT Ph.D. Student in Political Science at Northwestern...
The semester is over, the papers are graded, and the departmental meetings are over (for a while). The shopping is done, the house is clean, the presents are wrapped, the relatives are here, and the...
This article is cross posted from the Scottish Global Forum. In this form it is slightly modified and hyperlinked. The Nature of Threats to Scotland In March of 2015, a cry goes out in the town...
Editor’s Note: this is an abbreviated version of a post that originally appeared on my personal blog. In my previous post, I articulated one way international institutions can deter bad behavior. In...
Continuing the Duck series on highly improbable dystopian scenarios, here is an advertisement for the not yet released video game, "Homefront." The story is set in 2027 when a united Korea under the rule of North Korea's Kim Jong Un invades a severely weakened United States.Cold War buffs will note that the video game's narrative is from the writer of the awful 1984 film, "Red Dawn." Personally, I would have preferred a scenario in line with the eighties board game, "Fortress America," but that is probably too sophisticated for a first-person shooter style game.Along with the writer of Red...
If you're a nerdy professor trying to avoid grading, like I am, you might want to play around with Google Lab's new Ngram feature. The feature allows you to see how often a particular word or phrase has appeared within a large number of books over time. For examples, here is a chart comparing the use of the term "failed states" to "rogue states" from 1960 to 2010 in English language books scanned by Google Books:Or, here is a comparison of the term "Human Security" with "Humanitarian Intervention" from 1900 to 2010 in the English language holdings:Overall the specific terms are...
Recent developments in Europe, and especially the ongoing meltdown in Ireland, should force political economists to reevaluate how well their theories can explain the perpetuation of current international regimes. The past twenty years of IPE theorizing has been exceptionally exciting and productive, but as Kathleen McNamara and others have argued the tendency toward intellectual monoculture may have left the discipline without a toolkit for understanding tectonic shifts in international actors' behavior.In the 1990s, the Washington consensus attained something of the status of divine writ....
In keeping with the Duck tradition of reducing IR issues to rap videos...(It is worth sticking around until 4:55 for the cameo...)From The Juicemedia and Mother Jones
The initial release of a mere 291 out of 251,287 diplomatic cables has generated a predictable buzz on the blogosphere and established media outlets. Pundits have quickly maneuvered into standard structural roles in relation to the content of the leaked documents: the ho-hum nothing-to-see-here-move-it-along dismisser, the passionate defender, the morally outraged diplomat, etc. What seems to be missing is an analysis of this phenomenon as a form of global politics.In order to understand why Wikileaks is significant, it is important to realize that the organization is not particularly...
A couple of observations on the Wikileaks diplomatic info-dump as seen from London. First, European governments have been unanimous in their condemnation of Wikileaks, disgraceful undermining of diplomacy etc etc. But what do they really think? I’m sure they will be philosophical about the content of the US cables. These are the sort of assessments that every diplomat makes, and is supposed to make; I would bet a year’s salary that the sort of things American diplomats said about David Cameron would pale into insignificance beside the sort of things British diplomats said about George W....
Will no one think of the bacon?Hat tip to Robert Farley
In discussing the planned handover of security responsibilities to the Afghan National Army, Vice President Joe Biden stated:"Daddy is going to start to take the training wheels off in October -- I mean in next July -- so you'd better practice riding," he said of the plan that will be outlined at the NATO summit in Lisbon. (ABC News Radio)The undiluted mix of imperialism and paternalism, while embarrassing from a public relations standpoint, is a good guide to how the US plans to spin the transition. The US and ISAF will seek to shift responsibility and hence the blame for a precarious and...