The Duck of Minerva

Featured
Zeitenwende: Scholz Turns Back Time to Make Room for Action on Ukraine

Zeitenwende: Scholz Turns Back Time to Make Room for Action on Ukraine

by | May 16, 2022 | , ,

On February 24, just hours after Russia launched its assault on Ukraine, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock tweeted a simple message: “Today we are waking up in a different Europe. In a different world.” Three days later, the same could be said for waking up in a different Germany. For 70 years, Germany maintained an explicit and unyielding policy of not shipping weapons to conflict areas. This position was reversed with a single speech by Chancellor Olaf Scholz in the...

read more

About the Category: Featured

More Featured Posts

6+1 Questions about Armed Guests: Territorial Sovereignty and Foreign Military Basing

6+1 Questions about Armed Guests: Territorial Sovereignty and Foreign Military Basing

by | Dec 10, 2021 | , ,

What's the book? Sebastian Schmidt. 2020. Armed Guests: Territorial Sovereignty and Foreign Military Basing (New York, Oxford University Press). The argument? The United States maintains a massive global military footprint. Some of its overseas military bases are located in dependencies like Puerto Rico and Guam. The vast majority of base hosts are sovereign states. The practice of maintaining a long-term, peacetime military presence in another state (or “sovereign basing”) only developed in the last century. Before World War II, a foreign military presence usually meant one of three things:...

read more
Robert Jervis

Robert Jervis

by | Dec 10, 2021 | ,

As many of our readers have likely already heard, Robert Jervis died yesterday. The field has lost a gentle intellectual giant. Unlike many of my friends from Columbia, Bob wasn't on my dissertation committee; I only took one course from him. But I'll remember him as both brilliant and very generous. Indeed, back in November I received an email from a student in my "International Order" class. He was very excited because the Robert Jervis had agreed to a 45-minute interview over Zoom. The student had no idea, of course, that Bob was sick – and yet still took the time to speak to a college...

read more
Tarak Barkawi

Tarak Barkawi

by | Dec 7, 2021 | ,

Professor Tarak Barkawi joins Brent this week. He discusses growing up in Orange County in the 1970s and 1980s, in a very politically aware family, and his varied interests in military history but also LA’s punk rock scene, having a school that doubled as a fallout shelter and his first encounters with eye-opening racial violence. He talks about his decision to go to George Washington University, getting his master’s at the LSE, his brief overlap with John Vincent before the latter died, the influence of Bud Duvall at Minnesota, his work with Mark Laffey, going on the market, getting jobs at...

read more
We Urgently Need to Support Girls’ Education in Afghanistan

We Urgently Need to Support Girls’ Education in Afghanistan

by | Nov 19, 2021 | , ,

Since the Taliban’s takeover in Afghanistan in August 2021, there have been growing calls by many Afghans, along with the international community, to protect the rights of women and girls. Questions remain about how Afghans want to see women’s rights protected. A notorious Afghan proverb often repeated by the Taliban during their prior period of rule states that that ‘women belong either in the home or in the grave.’ Yet our research shows that this sentiment is not shared by men and women in eastern Afghanistan.  Questions remain...

read more