Exercising feminist curiosity: how Ukraine women are involved in the conflict and how Putin’s nationalist fever dream is a patriarchal one.
Sunflower seeds and Molotov cocktails
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Recent Posts
Trauma in Common: US Gun Violence and Violence in Armed Conflict
This is a guest post by Betcy Jose, Assistant Professor of Political Science at University of Colorado-Denver “This is a really good school, and now it’s like a war zone.” This is how one parent...
Crimea River
One of the most predictable elections is just around the corner: even Google has already proclaimed Putin the winner of the presidential race of March 18th 2018 in Russia. The only marginal hiccup...
Are IR Schools Broken? Nah.
IR program rankings are out in Foreign Policy. Discuss. Steve Walt has a provocative column in the same issue that I'm sure he didn't title that suggests "America's IR Schools Are Broken." The...
More Recent Posts
Can Elmo Save Pakistan?
In the latest attempt to project its "soft power" in South Asia, the US government has approved a $20 million project to bring a local adaptation of Sesame Street to Pakistan. Time magazine notes:"'The idea is to prepare and inspire a child to go on the path of learning,' said Faizaan Peerzada, a...
Is Peace Enforcement Cool Again?
In prepping for a fortuitously timely class session on humanitarian intervention, I reread Madeline Albright's op-ed from 2008 on the "end of intervention." The claim, which I bought at the time, was that the perceived illegitimacy of the Iraq War had resuscitated the norm of state sovereignty,...
More blogfare on lawfare
In my Friday post I forgot to give a shout out to Ben Wittes and the Lawfare Blog who have been writing about this since last fall. In particular, they had an excellent series of posts on the concept (but way of a discussion of the Rule of Law in by Brigadier General Mark Martins (in Centcom and...
How fares “lawfare”?
There has been so much going on with the international law front, it’s kind of hard to know where to begin. In sum:The Obama administration has decided to put Khalid Shiek Mohammed on trial at Guantanamo rather than New York City.The Obama administration has released a legal opinion on the...
Why we need to debate foreign policy in elections: Lessons from the UK 2010 General Election
FYI: I am blogging on Canada-related issues at the Cana-blog. It basically satiates my desire to engage with Canadian issues without boring Duck readers to death about our various neuroses from North of the 49th Parallel. Do check it out though, eh?Last year I blogged about the UK General Election...
Safe Conducts, Immunities and International Crimes
The arrival in the UK of the Libyan Foreign Minister and former Head of Intelligence, Moussa Koussa, raises some interesting questions. Consider the facts: one the one hand, although Moussa Koussa has, apparently, been a force for moderation in recent years, in his heyday he was an unapologetic...
The Infected Zone
UK Movie Poster for "Monsters" (2010). Source: Wikipedia.The post-9/11 generation sci-fi film "Monsters" (Gareth Edwards, 2010) is a kind of "Cloverfield" for the US-Mexican border (or if you're a real film buff, it is a "Sin Nombre" journey film with real aliens, i.e. gigantic extra-terrestials)....
Theses on Consistency and Intervention
Since Stephanie has quoted me on the subject, I thought I’d share some thoughts on intervention and consistency. 1. Consistency is a virtue – but it isn’t the only virtue. Sometimes good judgement points us in the direction of inconsistency; this is so in personal life as well as domestic and...
Morality, R2P, the nature of conflict and the emerging “Obama Doctrine”
There’s been some really interesting posts here on R2P in the last few days. At the risk of kicking a dead horse – although I hardly think this horse is dead - I’d like to raise a few points. (I've actually been writing this post over the past few days, and was going to post it later in the week,...
Since there is nothing else going on in the world, let’s talk about Canada!
International politics is such a bore these days, right? Good thing we have Canada to spice things up for us!There were two interesting developments yesterday for those living in the northern end of North America. First, it was announced that a Canadian, Maj. Gen. Charles Bouchard, will be heading...
We’re Sorry
We're sorry...That some of our soldiers publicly refer to your people in derogatory and racist language.That some of our soldiers shoot your unarmed civilians at random, defile their corpses, and cut off body parts to keep as trophies.That some of our soldiers killed the cousin of your head of...
Of Lords and Flies
The release of the first three of a reported 4,000 photos and videos from an American "kill team" in Afghanistan threatens to become the next "Abu Ghraib." The horrific images of civilian corpses being photographed with grinning American troops raises important questions about the American...