Paul Musgrave concludes the “Lab Leaks” symposium by engaging with his interlocutors and reflecting on the challenges faced by political science in an era of public-facing scholarship.
One of the most predictable elections is just around the corner: even Google has already proclaimed Putin the winner of the presidential race of March 18th 2018 in Russia. The only marginal hiccup...
Layna Mosley is Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research investigates the politics of sovereign debt, and the effects of global supply chains...
I tend to complain a lot about the NATO 2% expectation--that members are supposed to spend 2% of their GDP on defense stuff, which probably makes more more Canadian than anything else I do (I don't...
Too good and with the finale coming up, we need to double dip:
Sorry, faithful Duck readers, for the radio silence – I’ve been traveling for much of the last month and then – ugh – just started teaching a daily undergrad class. I promise – real blog posts are coming! In the meantime, I wanted to fill you in on some information I’ve been digesting in the last month. The information should be enough for all of us to “rant” about. A few weeks ago, I was at the Vision in Methodology conference – a wonderful conference for women in political science that are interested in all aspects of political methodology. One of the sessions was on implicit bias – a...
With the finale of this season of Game of Thrones upon us, I thought this take on the theme might be a suitable Friday Nerd entry.
With the fall of Mosul to the jihadists of Syria and Iraq, there is much blame-casting to be had. Some are blaming Obama for not keeping a residual force in Iraq although it is not clear that a small US force would have kept the Iraqi military from breaking. This always, always frustrates me because it ignores what the US faced in 2009--the accumulation of dynamics produced by the bad decisions of the past. In this case, if people remember, there were many stories where Iraqi elites said two things: yes, we want the U.S. to stay, but no, we cannot say that in public. Why? Pretty simple:...
This is a guest post by Heather Roff-Perkins, Visiting Associate Professor at the Josef Korbel School, University of Denver. On June 12, Christof Heyns, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, will brief the United Nations Human Rights Council on the human rights implications of lethal autonomous weapons. Last month, member states were likewise briefed by panels of experts at an informal meeting under the auspices of the Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW), which Charli Carpenter has blogged about here. Much of the discussion pertaining to lethal...
Laura Sjoberg recently wrote a post listing "The Unwritten Rules of IR." While it is an interesting review of some of the power relations, maneuvering, and indeed game-playing that goes on in the field, it also captured a particular American (maybe even just a personal) experience of being an IR scholar. Of course this makes sense, since Sjoberg is an American doing IR in America...but it felt a little bit more like 'Mean Girls- the IR Sequel'- like when Regina George (yes, I remember the main character/villain's name outlines the 'rules' of the table....maybe the problem is the table, not...
One of my favorite blogs turned ten this past weekend. Lawyers, Guns and Money was an early entrant to the IR blogosphere and Rob Farley and his crew are some of its most well-known voices. Last weekend they ran a series of anniversary reflections which I hope you'll surf on over and read. They're all amazing, funny, heart-twanging, and Rob's in particular has a lot of history and depth to it and some nice reflections on how the blogosphere has changed in the last decade. Since I contributed to LGM for eighteen months between January 2010 and May 2011, I also contributed an anniversary post...
At my side event presentation at the UN CCW Experts Meeting on Autonomous Weapons last month, I presented public opinion data showing strong US opposition to the idea of deploying such weapons. Since the panel was specifically focused on "morality and ethics" and since my remarks were on measuring the public "conscience" per se rather than public opinion in general, I re-examined my coding of open-ended comments with a view toward whether popular arguments for or against the use of autonomous weapons systems (AWS) were based on humanitarian principles or interest-based reasoning. At the...