We need a critical strategic studies, or maybe a strategic peace studies. Critical security studies, of course, is a venerable research tradition that I sometimes identify with. There are also scattered references to the phrase...
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...
This is a guest post from Peter Verovšek, a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Politics/International Relations at the University of Sheffield The Coronavirus has turned us all into amateur...
One of the more specious criticisms of the "stopkillerrobots" campaign is that it is using sensationalist language and imagery to whip up a climate of fear around autonomous weapons. So the argument goes, by referring to autonomous weapons as "killer robots" and treating them as a threat to...
In the Guardian this morning, Christof Heyns very neatly articulates some of the legal arguments with allowing machines the ability to target human beings autonomously - whether they can distinguish civilians and combatants, make qualitative judgments, be held responsible for war crimes. But...
Above, I've posted another photo of the crack Duck blogging team (that's me upper left, my dissertation advisor is lower right). Right now, I'm en route to a conference in Norway so my 22 month old son has prepared the following post of Thursday Morning Linkage. (Well, if he had, there would be...
This brief post started life as a comment on a Facebook discussion thread about peer reviewing practices but I thought it might deserve a wider readership. The question was raised: is it kosher for a journal editor to request information about good reviewers from the author of the manuscript? The...
In his latest post, PTJ moves us past the worst critiques of "rational choice theory" and focuses on a few more nuanced concerns.1 I'm glad to see the conversation progressing, and this type of exchange is one of the things I love most about academic blogging. However, I find some of PTJ's...
Another day, another piece chronicling problems with the metrics scholars use to assess quality. Colin Wight sends George Lozano's "The Demise of the Impact Factor": Using a huge dataset of over 29 million papers and 800 million citations, we showed that from 1902 to 1990 the relationship between...
According to a new survey I've just completed, not great. As part of my ongoing research into human security norms, I embedded questions on YouGov's Omnibus survey asking how people feel about the potential for outsourcing lethal targeting decisions to machines. 1000 Americans were surveyed,...
So, I teach at a policy school, and though our core pedagogical enterprise is the MA program, we have a small PhD program that is a mix of political science, economics, and maybe a dash of public administration. Though I have not worked closely with that many PhD students, the ones I have worked...
My colleague and friend James Ron has a new article up at Open Democracy (with Shannon Golden and David Crow) on asymmetric access of global populations to human rights machinery. The article is one in a new Open Democracy series "Open Global Rights," which aims to " relocate the [human rights]...
We missed Ken Macleod's public eulogies for Iain Banks: he did an interview for As it Happens, wrote an article in The Guardian, and has some brief personal words on his blog. From the conclusion of his Guardian piece: The reputation and reception of Iain Banks as a mainstream author may fluctuate...
This is more of a riff on Phil's post from last week than a direct reply; the post that Dan and I wrote addresses more directly the issue of actor autonomy that we think Phil misunderstood us on we and Phil were clearly on different semantic pages, so I am not going to go back over that ground...
David Silbey on the long century of the US surveillance state. Don't throw the espionage baby out with the domestic-surveillance bathwater? Tom Nichols throws the gauntlet down at opponents of more active US involvement in the Syrian civil war. Dan Trombly ruminates on the concept of "blowback" in...