Name Of The Book… And Its Coordinates? Jennifer D. Sciubba, ed. 2021. A Research Agenda for Political Demography (Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, Massachusetts, USA: Edward Elgar) What’s the Argument? We cannot understand contemporary international relations...
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...
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...
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...
While the lead up to tenure is often terrifyingly stressful, even attaining that goal is a bit daunting as it raises the question, "Now what?" I suppose on some level one can then set one's sights on the next thing, Full Professor, but that obviously doesn't have the same significance in terms of career and life trajectory that tenure does. Getting tenure raises all sorts of questions about what you want to be when you grow up, if a life in the academy makes you happy, or if the kind of life you are leading in the academy is what you want to be doing. When I first started graduate school, I...
I've been MIA of late on the blog, mostly a function of end-of-term obligations. I've led a year-long graduate course on global wildlife conservation (course blog here). If you haven't followed the news of late, iconic wildlife species like rhinos and elephants are threatened with extinction, mostly because rising incomes in China and Vietnam in particular are allowing more people to satisfy their desires for wildlife products. Since the late 2000s, there has been a surge in demand for wildlife products. For example, poaching of rhinos, most of which survive in South Africa, have increased...
Roads. Who can be against them, right? They allow us to get from A-to-B. And as anyone who has been to a place where there were no roads can attest, their absence is a real impediment to the modern political economy. The construction of roads is thus a central feature of the international development agenda. The World Bank publishes analysis of road investment by developing countries. The World Trade Organization claims ~30% of all overseas development aid ($25-$30 billion) is spent on trade related development—central to which is road construction and maintenance. Which is why a recent...
I thought of this incredible eco-ad campaign, NatureisSpeaking.org, when I read Bronwyn Leebaw's fascinating article "Scorched Earth: Environmental War Crimes and International Justice" in Perspectives on Politics. Â This is a much-overdue analysis of the place of the earth and environmental damage in the laws of armed conflict - two issues areas rarely studied by political scientists. Leebaw examines representations of the natural environment in laws of war as they have evolved in four stages: under Grotius, a conception of Nature as Property, with protections articulated in the same way...
Today is World Wildlife Day, and species we think of as part of the fundamental awesome creatures of the natural world - elephants, rhinos, and sharks - face unprecedented risks of extinction, particularly as a result of rising demand from Asia and China in particular. Â I'm currently teaching a year-long class on Global Wildlife Conservation for which my students have been writing some excellent posts on the poaching crisis and what can be done. If you are not familiar with this problem, this brief post provides a bit of background. Over the past couple of years, news of the global poaching...