This is the third and final part of a three part interview between Adam B. Lerner (ABL) and Patrick Thaddeus Jackson (PTJ). It is the first instalment of a new series of interviews on Duck of Minerva entitled Quack-and-Forths.
I am (sort of) on vacation and visiting the Motherland. In the meantime, I allowed myself a couple of days of couch potato mode that included some Russian TV. A political scientist in me is never on...
The past week has seen a boiling-over of controversy regarding a publication by Bruce Gilley entitled “The Case for Colonialism,” appearing in the journal Third World Quarterly, leading some to even...
In some sense, it is with a heavy heart that I write my last permanent contributor blog post at the Duck. I’ve loved being with the Ducks these past years, and I’ve appreciated being able to write...
In Diffused War, Andrew Hoskins and I argued we’ve entered a new paradigm of warfare. The wikileaks stories seem to confirm much of this account. War is mediatized, we wrote, as the institutions of war and those affected by war take a form governed by continual media recording, display and archiving. This creates diffuse causal relations between action and effect, since mediatization can amplify or contain the cognitive and emotional response any action generates in ways not dependent on the initial action itself. Militaries, NGOs, insurgents, journalists – none can predict the outcomes of...
While WikiLinks is dumping information from the US military all over the internets, the South African government is taking some rather disturbing steps to ensure that citizens, citizens and pretty much everyone in between will not have the right to access any information deemed a threat to "national security". What kind of information threatens national security? Well, according to the “Protection of Information Bill”, pretty much whatever government (local, regional, national) decides. It’s a dangerously vague bill that could possibly do great harm to South Africa. I don't think I need to...
Just a few initial observations/questions1. Iraq Body Count is arguing that the documents help provide further information on civilian deaths. No doubt this will add further impetus for the call for militaries to release information on casualties killed in armed conflict. I wonder, however, if IBC has to walk a fine line here – if they say that the information released provides information on hundreds or thousands of previously unknown incidents, it means that they are effectively saying their own methodology was flawed. On the other hand if they say that it confirms their numbers, then...
In April of this year I noted the death of Professor Fred Halliday – a noted scholar of nationalism, the Middle East and International Relations generally. He was something of a giant in British IR and I know his work was well known throughout the Middle East as well. I was fortunate enough to be in one of his last MSc International Relations courses at the London School of Economics in 2001-2.There are a number of things being done to commemorate Professor Halliday and his work. For London readers, there will be an event at the LSE on 3 November (tickets required). Additionally, Alejandro...
The question of human over-population of our planet seems to resurface every few decades, driven by fears that there are too many people to feed, clothe and shelter, or that the sheer volume of human beings working, travelling and polluting is causing environmental damage. But the persuasiveness of such claims is weakened empirically and normatively. In terms of facts, it does not help the over-population claimants that every time the population question is raised, humanity seems to deal with the problem. People do find food, clothing and shelter. And in terms of values, the notion of...
The London School of Economics runs a blog on British politics to which I contribute occasionally; this week I’ve posted on the British Government’s defence review, and I thought I’d share this with the Duck readership. A little bit of context: the new British government is simultaneously engaging in developing a National Security Strategy, while conducting a Comprehensive Spending Review and a Defence Review. The previous government made a number of rather bizarre defence procurement decisions without much sense of how they would be paid for so there is a problem here not entirely of the...
Last week I participated in a workshop at the Al Jazeera Center for Studies in Doha, Qatar, which brought to an end the ESRC’s Radicalisation & Violence programme of research projects, led by Prof. Stuart Croft. I was one of several researchers invited to present recent research on ‘terrorism, resistance and radicalisation’. My fledgling experience of academia has thus far been that debates rarely get politicised. It is noteworthy when it happens, triggering a visceral thrill or horror as we depart from our scripts of professional civility. The Radicalisation & Violence programme has been...
The Commonwealth Games begin tomorrow in Delhi, which offers a good excuse for some thoughts on two neglected topics in contemporary international relations – India and the Commonwealth. With 54 nations involved the Games are a major international sporting event, and were bid for by India as a way of demonstrating their emerging significance in the world, a kind of Olympics in a minor key that would do for the Indian bit of the BRIC nations what the Beijing Olympics did for China. To put it mildly, things have not quite worked out as intended. Some twenty plus firms were involved in the...