This is the first instalment of a new series of interviews on Duck of Minerva entitled Quack-and-Forths.
Whisk(e)y and Epistemic Pluralism: A Quack-and-Forth (Part I)
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Featured
Protecting Civilians Through Responsible Scholarly Engagement (Vacation Planning Edition)
Recently I highlighted Korbel's new Responsible Engagement Institute, an important innovation in our profession. I shouted this out in the context of my own concerns with survey experiments that...
Seeing Israel and Palestine Up Close
I just came back from eight days in Israel and Palestine, as I participated in a program, Academic Exchange, that has already taken something like 600 scholars (mostly IR but also other political...
On Responsible Scholarly Engagement
Rob Farley has posted a Lawyers, Guns and Money podcast discussing my new research with Alex Montgomery on why reports of Americans' willingness to target civilians have been greatly exaggerated....
More Featured Posts
Friday Nerd Blogging: Star Wes Awakens
The folks here are big, big fans of Star Wars, so we were most happy this week with the new teaser. Many parodies have/will ensue. Here is the Wes Anderson take:
Clans
Rutgers University law professor (and blogger) Mark S. Weiner has been awarded the 2015 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order for ideas set forth in his 2013 book, The Rule of the Clan: What an Ancient Form of Social Organization Reveals About the Future of Individual Freedom. The award includes a $100,000 cash prize and is administered by the University of Louisville. The book makes a fairly complicated argument about clans, identity groups, liberal democracy, states, and national security. The press release ostensibly explains the highly readable book's main argument: Clans,...
The Perils of a M/W/F Class
Greetings, fellow Duck readers. I realize I've been MIA this semester - DGS duties and ISA-Midwest stuff took too much of my non-research time. Another factor in my absence, however: a Monday Wednesday Friday schedule. And, it sucked.[1] Like large-tornado-near-my-hometown sucked. Today marks the last Friday class of the semester – thank god.[2] Even though I should be getting back to research this morning, I wanted to write a little bit about why I think 50 minute/3 day a week classes should be banned in our discipline. Let’s take a lesson from the educators: longer class periods that...
Not Surprised is Not Good Enough: what soldier atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan can teach us about Ferguson
By some strange twist of fate I happened to watch the Kill Team, a documentary about the infamous US platoon that intentionally murdered innocent Afghan men while on tour. When, in 2010 the military charged five members of the platoon, the case drew international attention due to the graphic nature of the killings, evidence that the men mutilated the bodies and kept parts as trophies, and indications that the killings were part of a wider trend of 'faking' combat situations in order for soldiers to 'get a kill.' While the premeditated killing of Afghan...
2015 OAIS Blogging Awards: Call for Nominations!
It's that time of year folks. We are now receiving nominations for the third annual Online Achievement in International Studies (OAIS) Blogging Awards -- aka the Duckie Awards. We are asking Duck readers to reflect back over the past year to consider the best blogging contributions to the field of International Studies and to submit nominations for the awards. Post your nominations in the comments thread or drop us a note at duckofminerva2015 @ gmail.com. We will later ask readers to vote for the three finalists in each category. Last year's winners have generously agreed to judge the...
World AIDS Day 2014: Five Data Points, Four News Items, and Three Films
Today is World AIDS Day, an annual day of remembrance and reflection on the global AIDS crisis held since 1988. Overshadowed this year by the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, we should keep in mind that this problem is not over even if it has receded from news coverage in recent years. Here are 5 facts and 4 news items about the state of the current epidemic to keep in mind, and 3 recent films - How to Survive a Plague, Fire in the Blood, and the Dallas Buyers Club, which help bring some context to understanding grassroots mobilization in the U.S. and internationally to combat the AIDS...
Ebola is Not Over
The Ebola crisis isn't over. In the absence of new infections in the United States, Americans have moved on to other preoccupations (Ferguson anyone?), but the problem hasn't gone away even if Google searches have plunged. There has been some positive news out of Liberia with a decline in the rate of new infections from 80 new cases per day to about 20 to 30, but the news from Sierra Leone suggests the problem is far from under control, with the end of the rainy season potentially making transit easier and facilitating the spread of the virus further. More troubling still is the new hot spot...
Meaningful or Meaningless Control
In May of 2014, the United Nations Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW) first considered the issue of banning lethal autonomous weapons. Before the start of the informal expert meetings, Article 36 circulated a memorandum on the concept of “meaningful human control.” The document attempted to frame the discussion around the varying degrees of control over increasingly automated (and potentially autonomous) weapons systems in contemporary combat. In particular, Article 36 posed the question as one about the appropriate balance of control over a weapons system that can operate...