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“We are not okay. And you shouldn’t be either.”
Sadly, it took the extrajudicial killing of yet another unarmed black man at the hands of the police for me to find my voice about finishing a dissertation under quarantine during a pandemic. I have...
It isn’t just about Wæver and Buzan
In case you missed it, quite the IR controversy has broken out. In August 2019, Alison Howell and Melanie Richter-Montpetit (hereafter H&RM) published “Is securitization theory racist?...
Revisiting the Fear-Apathy Cycle in Global Health in Light of COVID-19
This is a guest post from Ashley Fox, an Assistant Professor of Public Administration and Policy at Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, University at Albany, SUNY. who researches the...
More Recent Posts
Tuesday Nerd Blogging
*via George Takei see also his new book.
ISA Working Groups
Registration is now open for the two ISA Working Groups scheduled for ISA Toronto. I am coordinating one of them with my colleague Kavita Khory on Global Trends in War, Conflict and Political Violence. The Working Group is sponsored by the International Security Studies Section. Here's a brief...
Game of Chicken and the US Government Shutdown: What Game Theory Can Tell Us About Likely Outcomes
As I’m sure all astute Duck readers are aware, today marks a critical day in the US House and Senate – if no deal is struck today on a spending bill, the US government will shut down at one minute after midnight on Tuesday morning. The issue at the heart of the controversy: a series of amendments...
Monday Linkage
Gunmen killed scores of students in their sleep at Yobe State College of Agriculture in Nigeria early Sunday morning. via Adam Jones on FB, it is interesting to note this massacre was reportedly sex-selective, with only young males targeted - what Jones has referred to elsewhere as 'gendercidal'....
Big Brother meets Network Analysis?
A story in the New York Times this morning suggests that the National Security Agency has been analyzing our social networks through email and phone call records, apparently accomplishing “large-scale graph analysis on very large sets of communications metadata” of American citizens and foreign...
Why is the International Community Protecting the Wrong Norm in Syria?
Former Duck guest blogger Betcy Jose has published an excellent Foreign Affairs Snapshot pointing out the irony of a robust norm enforcement operation in Syria to protect the chemical weapons taboo, while perversely ignoring, even permitting, the violation of a far more foundational norm: the norm...
Friday Morning Linkage
A little late Friday morning reading: Moving toward a Syrian Tribunal? Several former tribunal prosecutors will introduce their draft resolution on October 3 calling for one. Leslie Vinjamuri explains why she thinks the UNSC is wise not to refer Syria to the ICC. Research from our friends at...
Friday Nerd Blogging
Originally circulating as "Every Sci-Fi Starship Ever In One Mind-Blowing Comparison Chart," there are some pretty important gaps in this picture, including (allegedly) no Serenity and nothing from Spaceballs. Still, a noble endeavor. If you haven't already seen them comments at Kotaku are fun to...
Thursday Morning Linkage
I was transfixed this week by the week's events in Kenya, the attacks by Al-Shabaab on the Westgate shopping center that resulted in the deaths of at least 60 people. With friends just a stone's throw away from that mall, it was hard to turn away from that unfolding set of events. So, this week,...
The Numbers Do Not Lie: People Don’t Like Numbers
Perhaps the first Monkey Cage post at the Washington Post presents some numbers that show that policy-makers tend not to like the higher tech kind of poli sci (or theory) We knew this from previous TRIP reports and other studies, but still it is important to consider such stuff, especially given...
Research Primer for Religion and IR
Michael Desch and Daniel Philpott at Notre Dame have concluded their two-year Mellon funded working group on religion and IR and published their final report titled Religion and International Relations: A Primer for Research. Desch, in his introduction (titled: "The Coming Reformation of Religion...
NGOs: Chemical Weapons are the Least of Syrian Civilians’ Concerns
Action on Armed Violence is circulating some terrific info-graphs and advocacy videos documenting civilian harms from various conventional weapons in Syria: By even the most cautious estimates, explosive weapons have killed and injured tens of thousands of people in Syria. They are thought to be...