At its core, the current war in Ukraine reflects an incompatibility of nationalist narratives. Many Ukrainians want to escape Russia’s imperial shadow. Putin wants to reextend that shadow – to erase Ukraine as an independent national identity.
In recent days, there has been much discussion about the so-called Big3 journals in Political Science: the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, and the...
Earlier this week, a particularly volatile fissure within the Trump Administration opened up. Nikki Haley, the US Ambassador to the United Nations, announced on Sunday that the Administration would...
This is a guest post by Betcy Jose, Assistant Professor at University of Colorado-Denver and author of Norm Contestation: Insights into Non-Conformity with Armed Conflict Norms. Follow her on...
George Gallup - what have you started? The traditional methods for a state to know what overseas publics are thinking are changing. Instead of relying on your embassy staff’s alertness, your spies’ intelligence and the word of dissidents, we’re reaching the point where foreign policymakers can...
The Canard "All the fake news that's fit to print" ---Earth The globe is suffering from a sudden decline in the volume of oxygen, sending world leaders scurrying to sustain life on earth. Although scientists recognize that there could be any number of reasons, such as increases in pollution and...
They're updating this. I have a report in the 2009 (they're a bit behind...just go with it) Yearbook of International Humanitarian Law on efforts to produce a new service-wide US Department of Defence Law of War Manual. This would replace FM 27-10 and (should it ever see the light of day...just go...
Rodger's post about the commercial success of Dan Drezner's Theories of International Politics and Zombies joins a long line of fellow Ducks' quacking about this book. I've been a part of the conversation, too, but I can write about the book from a perspective that I think is unique: I've just...
In today's 'horrors of bad social science', we have a piece by Jennifer S. Bryson, director of the Witherspoon Institute’s Islam and Civil Society Project, (which seems to be a conservative think-tank) who has written a piece for the Institute's blog on the threat of pornography for national...
Yesterday the ICRC released a report on the very scary and depressing trend of attacks on medical workers in situations of armed conflict and civil disturbances:According to Dr Robin Coupland, who led the research carried out in 16 countries across the globe, millions could be spared if the...
Can any readers here at the Duck direct me to the exact quote of Dean Acheson (I believe it was), who said something along the lines of 'nine tenths of foreign policy is managing the domestic ability to have a foreign policy' or something like that. It was his argument that domestic politics and...
Emperor Bahadur Shah IISource: Wikimedia CommonsThe din of the Great Rebellion of 1857 will continue to echo into our era, marred as it is by ongoing wars and insurgencies in Muslim lands. I believe that a careful study of those events are pertinent for American and European students of global...
I was quoted in Canada’s Globe and Mail today about a trial involving a Canadian citizen, Abdullah Khadr, who the US has requested for extradition on terrorism charges. (This is the older brother of Omar Khadr who is still in Guantanamo prison.) It’s an interesting case for a variety of reasons so...
A hypothesis: Pirates, hackers, and terrorists are perennial actors in international relations. They will never be permanently defeated; the frontier will never be permanently settled.The underlying material reason that these actors exist is actually quite simple. Each of these (Weberian) ideal...
Fact: 6 years after gay marriage Happy Cat is still happy.It’s the 6th anniversary of gay marriage in Canada and – financial meltdowns in Europe and America aside – the world hasn’t ended. Society has remained intact. Babies are being born, flowers are blooming, a Canadian hockey team still can’t...
E-waste in ChinaPhoto Source: GreenpeaceDemanufacturing is the process of disassembling, recycling, remanufacturing, or refurbishing outdated industrial and consumer products, particularly electronics (i.e. e-waste management, asset recovery, or urban mining) but also including activities such as...