Numerous pundits have lamented the that Americans have not responded to the Covid pandemic with the unanimity they demonstrated after 9/11. But do we really want to return to the post-9/11 era of emergency consensus?
The US Congress recently introduced bills that would call on the Trump Administration to press China over its treatment of the Uighurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic group. This would seem to be a...
Details continue to trickle out about the horrific assassination of Saudi dissident and writer Jamal Khashoggi. This has captured the attention of foreign policy experts, who have questioned the...
I feel like I should say something about the disappearance—and likely assassination—of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi. This tragedy was enabled by America’s permissive stance towards Saudi Crown...
The following is a guest post by Margaret Peters, who teaches political economy and migration at Yale University. She is currently finishing her book project When Business Abandoned Immigration: Firms and the Remaking of Globalization." Recent pictures of Syrian refugee crisis from 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi lying dead on a beach in Turkey to migrants sitting in camps in Hungary have increased the calls for the West to “do something.” Instead of doing the easiest, most effective, and least expensive thing to protect Syrians (and other refugees) – allowing them to enter and stay in wealthy...
* Please note: I absolutely oppose publishing the image of Aylan Kardi on this website* Since my name is mentioned- and our short twitter exchange highlighted in Annick's previous post as potentially the inspiration point for her piece- I feel I need say something. First, I'll acknowledge that the image we are debating hit me somewhere deep because the boy is the same size and age as my son. Those points of connection made me look at the image differently and that difference in how I saw the image made me feel embarrassed, upset, and unsure what it meant about how I saw the whole 'package'...
Yesterday the picture of little Alan (previously identified as Aylan), lying dead in the sand on the shores of the Mediterranean, circled the world. It provoked strong reactions from those who 'witnessed' his death in this manner and, not unlike the debates following some of the images shared after 9/11 (I wrote about that then), people questioned the ethics of sharing the images particularly without warning (see replies by some who shared here, here & here and note that his father wants the image to be shared if it can provoke action). Indeed, it was this tweet from fellow Duck Megan...
We are witnessing the horror of war. We see it every day, with fresh pictures of refugees risking their lives on the sea, rather than risking death by shrapnel, bombs, assassination or enslavement. For the past four years, over 11 million Syrians have left their homes; 4 million of them have left Syria altogether. Each day thousands attempt to get to a safer place, a better life for themselves and their children. Each day, the politics of resettlement and the fear of terrorism play their part. The last major resettlement campaign in the US came after the Vietnam War. Over a 20-year period 2...
My first post on the Duck focused on the emergence of the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag and campaign, pointing also to the ease with which hashtags can get appropriated and campaigns derailed. Yesterday, #BringBackOurGirls Nigeria (@BBOG_Nigeria on twitter) started a one week campaign to mark 500 days since the abduction. Given the continuation of the campaign, in today's post I want to dig a bit deeper in examining the urge to do "something": Why do some events capture our attention while others fail to produce any kind of reaction? What kind of reactions are helpful? And - for whom? The...
This post was written with Lindsay Heger, who is Associate Director, One Earth Future Foundation. We’ve seen the rise of judicial means to bring human rights violators to trial in recent decades, both regionally and globally. Most famously, the International Criminal Court, was established after the Rome Treaty was ratified in 2002 in order to bring the most egregious state violators of human rights to to account for crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes (though this court has not been without its controversies, most acute of which is that the court deliberately...
Over the weekend news came from Ecuador that Dr Manuela Picq of Universidad San Francisco de Quito, had been beaten and arrested while participating in a legal protest over indigenous rights as a journalist. Initially hospitalised as a result of injuries sustained at the hands of police, she was informed that her visa had been cancelled due to her having engaged in “political activity” and that she would be deported from Ecuador, where she has lived and worked for the past eight years. She is currently being held in a hotel that is used to detain illegal immigrants until her case is heard...
Gamification is "is the application of game elements and digital game design techniques to non-game problems, such as business and social impact challenges", to borrow the course description from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania's Gamification MOOC. The approach has been used to try and improve employee productivity, facilitate risk prevention education (and indeed many other forms of education) , resolve social conflict, and, perhaps less surprisingly, in marketing. And just in case you thought there were any contexts in which gamification couldn't be used, militaries...