Climate change will exacerbate many of the political, social, and economic forces that generate conflict and insecurity – with enormous consequences for humanity.
6+1 Questions about States and Nature
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Recent Posts
Writing Wednesdays: write to a deadline by any means necessary
Scholarly work is often written to deadline—the contribution to an edited volume, the essay for a journal’s special issue, and the book review are all going to be fit into someone else’s bigger...
Peacekeeping’s Perverse Effects: Bolsonaro and Brazil’s Remilitarized Politics
In under two weeks, Brazil will have the second round of its presidential election. Former military officer and fan of fascists Jair Bolsonaro looks set after a strong first-round showing to defeat...
Do we need to teach the IR paradigms at all?
Over the weekend, fellow guest contributor Luke Perez had an interesting post on whether we need to include the grand paradigms of international relations (realism, liberalism, and constructivism)...
More Recent Posts
Seoul 2012 Nuclear Security Summit
This week is the big nuclear security summit in Seoul, with something like 60 attending countries and over 40 heads of state or government. A friend from a Korean expat magazine here in town asked me for a brief write-up. Here are the issues as I see them from Korean IR and the local media. For...
Roseanne vs Kim: TV icons and the Republican ‘war on women’
Over the last few weeks it has been hard not to get overwhelmed by all the headlines related to the Republican primaries and women. There has been theRush Limbaugh fiasco, with Rush outdoing his usual dink-guisting self by calling law student Sarah Fluke a slut. This has been followed by...
It’s Time to De-Russianize the BRICS
With Putin’s ‘return’ to the presidency, Russia is now officially a joke as a serious great power state. True, Putin has been ridiculous for awhile, what with those shirtless photo-ops that came across like desperate, bizarre geopolitical ‘ads’ that Russia is still a superpower. But this is...
The US will not ‘Pivot’ much to Asia (3): We can’t afford it
Here are parts one and two, where I argued that there is no constituency in the US for the pivot, and that Asia is so culturally distant from the US, that Americans are unlikely to care enough to sustain the pivot. But we also don’t really need to pivot, nor do we have the money for it:3. The ME...
The ISA Drinking Game
The Duck crew getting ready for theirannual meet-up in 2011.We are now two weeks away from the start of the annual International Studies Association convention in sunny San Diego. In 2010 the Duck developed the APSA drinking game. Here is the ISA version for your conferencing pleasure. (Oh, and if...
The US will not ‘Pivot’ much to Asia (2): We don’t really care @ Asia
This is my Asian pivot.Here is part one, where I argued that there is no constituency in the US to support an Asian pivot besides the some businesspeople. 2. Connected to the first point is that Americans don’t know much about Asia. Of course, it’s true Americans don’t know a lot about the world...
Anger in America
Rush Limbaugh, the teaparty, OWS, all the way to the seven sisters -- a deeply misguided Smith College alumna, an open feud between Barnard and Columbia... and so it goes... Bobcat Goldthwait's new dark satire, God Bless America is supposed to be an hysterical look at the mixing of stupidity and...
International Women’s Day: Cupcakes and Hateraid
I did not make these to destroy feminism.Duck readers, I have a confession. I bake cupcakes. Thousands of them. I love doing it, I love icing them, I love decorating them and I really like eating them.This is not something that I would typically share with a blog on international politics....
The US will not ‘Pivot’ much to Asia (1): We don’t really Want to
I found this image here. So the US pivot toward Asia is all the rage in foreign policy now. Obama and Secretary Clinton genuinely seem to believe in this, and there good reasons for it. Briefly put, Asia has the money, people, and guns to dramatically impact world politics in a way that no other...
Invisible Children – Pretty Dang Visible
KONY, WE GON' FIND YOU - as soon as I buy my bracelet!Anyone who has been on Facebook and Twitter over the past 24 hours has probably seen impassioned pleas to watch a high-production video by Invisible Children, an American NGO (whose Board of Directors just happens to be entirely white American...
Here is something you can’t understand….
...How I could just kill a man!Obama said today, or at least I think it was today, that "we have Israel's back." So have we replaced the cowboy swagger bullshit with some urban swagger bullshit? Fo shizzle.In general, I object to any dumbing down of foreign policy, even in the public discourse,...
The unconquerable village
I'm very much looking forward to attending this year's International Studies Association conference in lovely San Diego. This is partly because I can fight a losing struggle against its declared theme for this year:'Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan famously said, “The medium is the...