Everybody’s talking about nuclear war with Russia right now and it bugs me, not least because I’ve seen this nuclear frenzy before. Now, I think people have good reason to be worried about Russian nuclear use, as I wrote some five months ago. But...
This is a guest post from Ben Bellows, PhD (UC Berkeley, epidemiology), currently a researcher at the Population Council in Washington DC and a co-founder and the Chief Business Officer at Nivi...
Steve Saideman’s recent Duck piece on international relations scholars’ relative silence on issues of pandemics, and public health more generally, has ruffled feathers[1]and generated a lot of...
The Covid-19 pandemic has led to many useful discussions about public health, social responsibility, and tips for online learning. See the many great posts that have gone up here. One thing that...
M. David Forrest, a soon-to-be-assistant-professor of American politics, forwarded the following letter to the "interpretation and methods" listserv. He agreed to let me post it at the Duck. Given the methodological heterogeneity of our readership, I thought it would be of interest. It reads: [I...
A claim common among opponents of a treaty ban on autonomous weapon systems (AWS) is that treaties banning weapons don't work - suggesting efforts to arrest the development of AWS are an exercise in futility. Now this claim has been picked up uncritically by the editors at Bloomberg, writing in...
Sorry for the lack of Wednesday linkage posts recently. Bizarrely, on a day when I undertake an intercontinental move, I finally have time to catch up on linking. To commemorate the end of summer teaching and the brief respite between summer school and real school (hey, didn't I join academia so I...
Neill Blomkamp's "Elysium" packs a punch for an action sci-fi film even if its punches don't land. So yeah ... Jodie Foster doesn't give her best performance and the other roles for women in the film are completely lame. A beefy Matt Damon, bless his heart, is poorly cast. The core plot line...
I am on vacation so I am a bit late with the FNB. This 2014 film looks like a heap of fun--when superhero impersonators stop impersonating and start hero-ing:
Hey, y'all... Here's your linkage... Enjoy. Kapil Patel argues that a growing awareness of India's declining conventional deterrence vis-a-vis China has led it to create a new mountain strike corps of 40,000 men. Alec Metz at Registan reviews this year's Eid message from the sub-literate but...
Over at the National Interest T.X. Hamnes has a nice critique of AirSea Battle, seemingly the Pentagon's reigning strategy…sorry, operational concept...for dealing with a rising China and the problem of Anti-Access/Area Denial (for the official overview, see here). I expect I’ll be writing a bit...
Apologies for the delay in Thursday linkage but was a bit under the weather. It's the Texas heat, making me crazy and violent, or at least so suggests a recent empirical study in Science though it has its detractors. This week, I link to the back and forth of a major study on climate and conflict...
It’s almost APSA time and it seems all my friends are busy planning really wonderful sporting engagements for times they aren’t in panels. This always puts me in a bind – I thought we became academics because we were bad at sports! I can’t throw a Frisbee and soccer requires too much...
In all the media frenzy over “killer robots,” Terminator imagery comes up a lot. So do references to Battlestar Galactica. So does a specific scene from Robocop, soon to be remade to resonate with public fears of domestic drones. These iconic narratives invoke a recurrent theme in American science...
At least since the Copenhagen summit of 2009, global climate negotiations have stalled. Both academic researchers and policy analysts have recently emphasized the need to develop innovative strategies to break the negotiation gridlock. One such argument is that if major emitters show 'leadership'...
Yesterday, four Neo-Nazis were finally sentenced for their roles in a series of brutal killings of Roma families in Hungary in 2008 and 2009. Although the convictions have been applauded as a human rights victory, advocates are still demanding that Hungary steps up to the plate and protects the...