state takes precedence over their own lives. Focusing on states as persons distracts us from how violence travels across levels of analysis. States don’t do violence to one another. They inflict violence on actual living beings.
“There is not one civilized nation in the world that ought to rejoice in seeing India escape from the hands of Europe in order to fall back into a state of anarchy and barbarism worse than before...
This is a guest post from Erin Tolley an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. Professor Lee Ann Fujii passed away unexpectedly in Seattle on March...
This is a guest post from Tana Johnson, an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at Duke University. She is the author of Organizational Progeny: Why Governments Are Losing...
Forget protest movements and populist politics, to say nothing of academic blogging and scholarship -- if you want to change the world in your lifetime, this is the guy you ought to emulate. RIP Steve Jobs, one of the greatest practical visionaries of our time. PS note that Jobs' inspiration for...
Earlier today, I tweeted and blogged and even (dare I say it) facebooked to get some help. The challenge: to come up with a good analogy to capture the incredibly strange idea that cutting foreign aid might be a way to address the US fiscal crisis.My starting point: Cutting foreign aid to...
*post written with comments from fellow duck Ben O'LoughlinThe world media is reporting that Anwar al-Awlaki has been killed in Yemen – although details are very sketchy at this point. It is very clear to me that Awlaki was not a particularly nice person – he advocated some rather terrible things...
We're welcoming a couple of new guest bloggers to Duck. Jay Ulfelder, who blogs at Dart Throwing Chimps, is a political scientist who does excellent work forecasting regime survival and change, democratization, and violent conflict. And Erica Chenoweth from Wesleyan University will be posting as...
In an August 30 piece for BBC News, Shashank Joshi, a graduate student at Harvard University and associate fellow at a major U.K. think tank, argued that strong statements from American officials about Syrian president Assad's loss of legitimacy would help advance the Syrian revolution by...
Yesterday the FBI arrested a Massachusetts man, who has been subsequently charged with a number of crimes related to terrorism. [1] This is the latest in a string of plots that the U.S. has successfully thwarted, yet it raises alarms for many Americans who have felt immune from Al-Qaeda-inspired...
The musician K'naan's haunting elegy for his country Somalia, wracked by famine:So, 20 summers after I left as a child, I found myself on my way back to Somalia with some concerned friends and colleagues. I hoped that my presence would let me shine a light into this darkness. Maybe spare even one...
The world has been watching this week as the Palestinian Government prepares to make a bid to the Security Council for recognition as an independent state. Many thought Obama had backed himself into a corner with a statement last year declaring his support for Palestinian statehood. But never...
The website e-IR asked me to review how mainstream media have represented radical Islamist media in the past decade, and what this means for the spread of radical discourses more broadly. Here is my reply, and you can read the original at e-IR here. Mainstream media’s presentation of radical...
The banner image of the ICRtoP (International Coalition for the Responsibility to Protect) website features a photo of seven boys under the protective gaze of a UN peacekeeper as he carries his bottled water, while other soldiers patrol ahead on the pathway that they all share together. From a...
Debate over NATO's military intervention in the Libyan civil war has reinvigorated discussion among observers of international relations on the merits (or demerits) of the United Nations's Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine. You can find links to important entries in the current debate at...
The catastrophes of Rwanda and Bosnia led to a debate in the 1990s about the warning-response gap. Conflict prevention and early warning systems did not seem up to scratch. Third parties intervened too late, if at all. Spending was skewed towards mitigating the effects of conflicts, not on...