The US needs a more restrained approach to its national security, but not all arguments for restraint – and not all policies of restraint – rest on solid foundations.
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...
Today, there was a twitter conversation about whether doing public engagement, especially blogging and twitter, are penalized or not. The timing is good since my Ignite talk at the Duckies was very...
Nobody has come close to explaining how strategic narratives work in international relations, despite the term being banded about. Monroe Price wrote a great article in the Huffington Post yesterday that moves the debate forward. As I have already written, strategic narratives are state-led...
India appears to be continuing to shift its West Asia policy away from a once budding partnership with Iran, which aimed among other things to stabilize Afghanistan. It is rumored that in late March, the Indian National Security Adviser, Shiv Shanker Menon, delicately delivered a message to the...
The following word cloud from Crystal Smith's The Achilles Effect blog reflects the vocabulary commonly used for toy advertisements directed toward young boys (i.e. those toys in the 6-8 year old boy's section of the Toys 'R Us website were classified as "boys' toys"). While the data visualization...
Before I begin, I should thank those who have offered encouragement to continue the series and note, to those few who have not, that this is satire. Like all satire, it is an exaggeration of things that nevertheless have a kernel of truth. I myself am guilty of some of these things, like...
I am very, very ethnic.For those of you who weren’t following Canadian politics this week (I’m assuming that’s 98% of the Duck audience) the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC or “Tories”) took a lot of flack this week for calling up supporters and asking them to wear “ethnic” costumes. This is, of...
In the tradition of the satirical website, Stuff White People Like, I offer you the first installment of Stuff Political Scientists Like, which I will offer in irregular installments if political scientists like it. This seemed only appropriate since in the words of the author of that website: "It...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...