The Biden administration’s jarring revisionism on economic policy toward China (and by extension the world) is reviving discussions (most acute during the Trump and George W. Bush years) about whether it’s right to label the United States a...
It is not easy waking up in America these days. Sunday morning I woke up from a lazy weekend morning to see that a shooter had committed mass murder at a church in Sutherland Springs, TX. The...
Earlier this year, I wrote a piece for Duck regarding “declinist” arguments about liberal world order under Trump. I don’t think these arguments are going away, and in fact—just this week—they are...
“In the first place, we don’t like to be called ‘refugees’.” ~Hannah Arendt This past weekend was a weekend full of birthdays. Hannah Arendt’s 111th birthday fell on Saturday (October 14th), and—in...
[podcasts of ProfPTJ and DHN's contributions to the afternoon sessions are now up:PTJ: https://kittenboo.com/blog/2011/02/21/science-fiction-and-international-orders-ptj/DHN: https://kittenboo.com/blog/2011/02/21/science-fiction-and-international-orders-dhn/Also: the sci-fi author part of the session is available to listen to here.]Okay things are getting underway here at the LSE. I have never live-blogged before, but I'm told there is a first time for everything. Professor Chris Brown is just starting the introduction.Please note that I am trying to be as accurate as possible. I think there...
Today at the LSE there are two fabulous (read: fabulously nerdy) events on Science Fiction and IR. Even better, it's full of ducks! The event was organized by Chris Brown and features Dan Nexon and Prof PTJ. The first event, chaired by Chris Brown, features three prominent Science Fiction authors: Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Paul McAuley, Ken McLeod. The second event features several prominent academics who will be discussing the implications for IR. Chaired by Barry Buzan, it features our two ducks and Iver Neumann.My only regret is a lack of female voices. So, in an attempt to rectify this, I...
This is not my usual forte – Charli is much better on NGOs, networks and social things. (I just like tweeting.) However, last night when I checked my twitter, a fairly odd message came up from the American Red Cross:Slightly different from their usual “please donate blood” or “how are you preparing for the blizzard?” kind of emails.Within an hour, the tweet was withdrawn and replaced with this:Colour me impressed. A 130 year old humanitarian agency with a sense of humour.However, I’m drawing attention to the story because yesterday was also the day the ARC released research it has done (in...
In his Introduction to the recent New York Times collection of materials on Wikileaks, Open Secrets Bill Keller comments on the way in which the newspapers involved shaped the leaks in accordance with their own agendas. Thus, the Guardian gave extensive coverage to leaked US army accounts of civilian casualties in Afghanistan, reflecting their scepticism about the war; the NYT, on the other hand, took the view that they had already given front page coverage to all the major incidents and so gave this matter much less emphasis. There is no doubt that the Guardian’s perspective was much more...
Routledge has published Radicalisation and Media: Connectivity and Terrorism in the New Media Ecology, co-authored by Akil Awan, Andrew Hoskins and Ben O’Loughlin. The book presents results from our two-year ESRC-funded project on Radicalisation & Violence, which was awarded the maximum ‘Outstanding’ grade by the Economic and Social Research Council in 2010.Our chief finding, in a nutshell, is that despite the potential connectivity between radicalising networks like Al-Qaeda and ‘vulnerable’ youth and ‘terrorised’ publics, there is in fact a profound and structural disconnection. Security...
This is England?I woke up this morning to discover that apparently “state multiculturalism” has failed. According to Prime Minister David Cameron:...when a white person holds objectionable views, racist views for instance, we rightly condemn them. But when equally unacceptable views or practices come from someone who isn’t white, we’ve been too cautious frankly – frankly, even fearful – to stand up to them. The failure, for instance, of some to confront the horrors of forced marriage, the practice where some young girls are bullied and sometimes taken abroad to marry someone when they don’t...
When delicate political negotiations are needed, perhaps journalists need to get out of the way. Gadi Wolfsfeld’s studies of peace processes have shown how journalistic discretion in Northern Ireland created space for political leaders to make individual compromises. Such compromises would probably each have been unacceptable to their constituencies if lit up by a media spotlight, but only became public once the full package of a peace treaty was reached (Bono had to wait). Past negotiations between Israeli leaders with their Jordanian or Palestinian counterparts have been less successful in...