Paul Musgrave has written an important piece discussing how ideas developed within academia can have profoundly negative effects when they escape into the wild of the policymaking world. For someone like me who has been involved for many years in...
Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the sovereignest of them all? Asked no head of state — ever. And yet, the Russian Parliament is in the process of devising a document, which assesses levels of...
Picture the scene: throngs of people gathering as the night descends. They are looking up at the building across the way—patiently, expectantly. There is a low-hum of voices. Gradually, the voices...
The following is a guest post by Ayelet Harel-Shalev and Shir Daphna-Tekoah.  Ayelet Harel-Shalev is a Senior Lecturer at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Her academic interests include Feminist...
The following is a guest-post by my good friend Dave Kang of USC. Below he complements his recent TNI essay with the full flow of charts and graphics they screened out. This post is an important rejoinder to the constant assertion (think Robert Kaplan) that East Asia is on the brink of war and that everyone is freaked out by China. The thing is, East Asian military spending doesn’t actually suggest that at all… “In a recent National Interest essay I argued that military expenditures in East Asia do not appear to be excessively high. In this post I’d like to post the figures that informed the...
I'm so glad the semester is over so I can leave Friday to head to Brazil for a three week short course with my colleague Eugene Gholz. The topic is the World Cup "Rising Powers and Global Governance." We have reprised our 2010 edition of our South Africa short course (notice the pattern). I'm hopeful I'll be able to provide some flavor from our trip as we have an exciting series of meetings with government officials, scientists, academics, practitioners, diplomats, activists, and members of the business community. We're focused on three main themes, the environment, public health, and the...
[Please note: this is a guest post by Alison Howell, Rutgers University- Newark] The recent WHO designation of polio as a ‘global public health emergency’ has reignited debate as to whether the spread of polio is the result of reduced vaccine trust due to the CIA vaccination ruse in Pakistan. The vaccination ruse in Pakistan was part of the CIA's apparent aim to get Osama bin Laden’s family DNA. In 2011 the Guardian first reported on the ruse and global health experts began to express concern that this would lead to vaccine refusals in Pakistan. There, major efforts were underway as part of...
One of the more depressing elements in the narrative at the CCWUN Experts' Meeting this week has been the argument, repeated by a number of autonomous weapons proponents both in plenary and discussion, that an advantage of such weapons is the following: unlike human soldiers, they would never commit rape. This is but a new twist on a broader argument most prominently made by Georgia Tech Professor Ronald Arkin in his book Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots, but shared by many AWS proponents. The argument is that autonomous weapons might not just be good for national security,...
A common refrain from critics of the campaign to ban autonomous weapons is that these weapons are "inevitable." If that's true, then efforts to mitigate or pre-empt their use are not just a waste of time but a dangerous distraction from the real issue: staying ahead in an impending robot arms race or, at least, making sure that the weapons (which will definitely be built and deployed) have the best "humanitarian" programming possible. My colleague Michael Horowitz made the former argument recently in Foreign Policy. Kenneth Anderson and Matthew Waxman (Waxman is slated to speak tomorrow at...
I really don't want to write this post. I hate being a feminist or critical killjoy- especially when it comes to issues that seem to unite, motivate, and inspire large groups of people. We all need to feel inspired- like we are doing something good for the world. On Sunday I saw a small group of teenage girls wearing red and holding signs that read #BringBackOurGirls. It was sort of sweet to see them so clearly excited to be part of something- to be DOING SOMETHING. Activism is supposed to be political activity aimed at changing or influencing events. But what are the politics of...
I am in Geneva this week to participate in the Convention on Conventional Weapons' Experts' Meeting on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems. There, I'll present survey data I collected on US public sentiment around autonomous weapons, joining global civil society in reminding world governments of the Marten's Clause in the preamble to the Hague Convention. This clause, originally inserted to protect irregular non-combatants in guerilla wars, enjoins states to consider the "dictates of the public conscience" in determining the lawfulness of means and methods of war not openly prohibited by...
As a junior faculty member, I am not in a position to turn down advice. Fortunately, I receive good advice from mentors, colleagues, and friends. I am very thankful. Lately, I have also been getting advice from a few organizations for faculty development. They provide free tips on writing and productivity, navigating the job market, and balancing responsibilities as well as seek to debunk some of the myths about success in the academia. On average, their advice has been fairly useful (I have not signed up for paid services, and I certainly do not have a representative sample here). But...