Our next Bridging the Gap Book Nook features Tom Long of the University of Warwick. He discusses his new Oxford University Press book, A Small State's Guide to Influence in World Politics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glKAammexM8
This is a guest post from Paul Musgrave, Assistant Professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and Sebastian Karcher, Associate Director of the Qualitative Data...
Today is President Putin’s inauguration day and even Avengers couldn’t stop it, as evidenced by the arrested raccoon in the center of Moscow on Saturday during the unsanctioned rally ““He's No Tsar...
In March, I argued that the connections between climate change and security are complex, contingent, and not fully understood. Most of the academic literature has firmly focused on conflict onset...
Cry the beloved country.Well it’s been just over two weeks since the Canadian Election – and I am much overdue for the long promised third installment of the snoozefest series that I started. In some ways I’m glad I waited to write my reply: first, because I was contemplating throwing myself off...
Does America’s having great power mean that we must “manage” the global system? Fellow Duck Jon Western seems to think so. He writes in Current Intelligence that a major reason for the U.S. to reduce its military spending is so that other countries can be better “satisfied with American...
"... Yet the crowds were not placated, and they spent the next hour in the courtyard repeating the classic songs of the uprising, "thowra thowra huta nasr" (revolution, revolution until victory)." -Al Jazeera (4/25/2011)The revolution which overthrew Hosni Mubarak is in danger. While Western...
On Wednesday, Xavier Rauscher at International Jurist posted his response to the hullabaloo over international law and the death of bin Laden. I’ve said my piece on it here and I’m getting tired of the issue, but Rauscher’s post is interesting because he tries to look at the “big picture” – noting...
(Written with Alister Miskimmon) Following the death of Osama bin Laden, political pressure is mounting for an early scaling down of British military troops presence in Afghanistan ahead of David Cameron’s deadline of 2014 for the end of Britain’s combat mission. With this in mind the British...
With the politics of "budget crisis" dominating the political discourse, what does a Tea Party-dominated Republican foreign and defense policy look like? Not good. Gutting diplomacy and development and leaving defense spending largely uncut means American power becomes more blunt and unwieldy....
At the risk of beating a dead terrorist horse, I want to cite W. Hays Parks (former Special Advisor to the Office of Legal Counsel on Law of War Issues at DoD, JAG and possible stand in for Clint Eastwood in that Grand Torino movie) on the Osama bin Laden assassination/murder/killing debate that...
Strategist Edward Luttwak once observed that strategy has a paradoxical logic. The best way forward may be the longest way round, offence can be the best defence, and a seemingly victorious course pursued indefinitely will lead to over-reach. This is produced by the limitations of human strength,...
The killing of Osama bin Laden allows political leaders to further disentangle Iraq, Afghanistan and the whole war on terror concept; to wind down some operations and refocus others; to bring some stories to light and push others aside, to be forgotten. But how do those who served in these wars...
I am trying to find examples of humanitarian organizations that spoke out against the use of landmines by the Soviet Union during its invasion of Afghanistan from 1979-1989. Landmines were big as one of the weapons issues put up for debate in the late 1960s and early 1970s by the UN General...
How many times have you been accused of making a straw man argument? How many times have you deployed that rhetorical trump card against a foe? In blogs, in debates, in academic conference rooms, the straw man charge is a tried and true way of undermining an opponent and advancing your own...
So he wasn't armed, and maybe it wasn't legal, and we should have found him a long time ago. But we are missing the point. Our soft power was winning the war on terror. We just had to give it some time.The Financial Times reports: "Shopkeepers remember the [Osama] household demonstrating a...