A reporter asked me what we should expect from the upcoming climate negotiations, known as COP28, which will be held in the United Arab Emirates starting the end of November. This is my fairly off-the-cuff answer which may be somewhat pessimistic. I am more broadly...
This is a guest post from Morgan D. Bazilian, Director of the Payne Institute, Colorado School of Mines; Andreas Goldthau, Franz Haniel Professor at the Willy Brandt School of Public Policy, and...
This is a guest post from Jeff Colgan, Richard Holbrooke Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Climate Solutions Lab at Brown University. He is author of Petro-Aggression:...
Jen Evans (Twitter: @Jen_L_Evans) is a PhD student at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies and a Project Lead at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for International...
After nearly fifteen years of study, what do we know about the relationship between climate change and security? I recently attended a Woodrow Wilson Center event organized by the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) on the state of the field. Along with Geoff Dabelko, Halvard Buhaug, and Sherri Goodman, I offered my take on the field (the video is embedded below). In this blog post, I wanted to focus on five different causal pathways that I think represent the frontier of research on the study of climate and conflict, which include agricultural production and food prices, economic growth,...
On Saturday, the New York Times ran an investigative story that revealed a few significant facts about the US’s programs to study UFOs. There were some interesting findings in the article (and citations/paraphrases below are from the article, which can be found here): A 22 million dollar program called “Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification” was operated at DoD from 2007 to 2012—and, in fact, the program continues today without an official budget. The program produced documentary evidence of spacecraft hovering with no sign of propulsion. A contracted company, Bigelow Aerospace, was given...
I was fascinated by a brilliantly written, and well-thought out, guest post here on Duck, by Hannes Peltonen, posted over the weekend. If you haven’t had a chance to check it out, you won’t be disappointed. Peltonen presents an argument that digs into recent debates about the seemingly ubiquitous “anthropocene” and its relationship to world politics—and particularly the ways that IR theory should approach issues relating to humankind’s interconnectedness with natural/planetary processes. I’d like to take the opportunity to engage with Peltonen’s argument, with an eye toward extending the...
This is a guest post from Axel Michaelowa from the University of Zurich. He is also the lead author of the chapter on international agreements in the 5th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This is the second in the series from our Bonn panel on leadership in the climate regime. For over a decade, the EU was the undisputed leader of the international climate policy process. It had a grand vision for a universal international climate policy agreement modelled on the Kyoto Protocol. This was to be "crowned" during COP 15 in Copenhagen 2009. So the shock was...
I am just back from the climate negotiations in Bonn where I organized a side event at the German Development Institute (DIE). The event was co-sponsored by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW). These are my opening and closing remarks from the session. In subsequent days, I'll post additional interventions from some of the other panelists. Panelists included Aimee Barnes, Senior Adviser to Governor Brown of California; Sander Chan of DIE; Arunabha Ghosh, CEO of CEEW, one of India's leading think tanks on energy and climate; Angel Hsu, of Yale-NUS campus; and Axel...
This is a guest post from Hannes Peltonen, Senior Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Tampere The State of the Discipline International Politics/Relations (IR) has allegedly failed, a claim publicized periodically. Barry Buzan and Richard Little began this millennium by highlighting the discipline’s intellectual failure in the journal Millennium. More recently, an influential 2013 forum in EJIR on IR theory, edited by Tim Dunne, Lene Hansen, and Colin Wight, concludes something similar. IR theorists seem to consider that IR has failed, because it has a one-way...
Our second Bridging the Gap Book Nook entry comes from Sarah Stroup of Middlebury College and Wendy Wong of the University of Toronto, who discuss their new book The Authority Trap: Strategic Choices of International NGOs (Cornell, 2017).
Last night, I tried to dig in and understand whether and how the response to Hurricane Maria was delayed. I wrote a Tweetstorm that I Storify-ed below. I wanted to see what evidence if any supported those claims and in what ways a swifter and larger response potentially could have addressed some of the specific problems that buffeted and continue to confront Puerto Rico. In the last 24 hours, we've seen news reports from the Washington Post that criticized the president's desultory response along with a plea for help from the Mayor of San Juan. President Trump, of course, responded in kind...