This has been either a bad week for Israel, or a great week for Israel, depending on whom you ask or what your Twitter feed looks like. In the end, this may matter more for the relevance and impact of Middle East studies than anything else.
Layna Mosley is Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research investigates the politics of sovereign debt, and the effects of global supply chains...
Katie Couric, in a tweet last month about the Olympics , wrote: “I do think the Olympics is unique in that it transcends politics.” This view is pervasive in Couric’s formulation, but takes on a...
I tend to complain a lot about the NATO 2% expectation--that members are supposed to spend 2% of their GDP on defense stuff, which probably makes more more Canadian than anything else I do (I don't...
$250 million = the amount spent just by the US in FY2010 to counter narcotics in Afghanistan$100 million = the amount earned annually by the Taliban from narcotics trafficking304,000 acres = the number of acres devoted to opium in 2009304,000 acres = the number of acres devoted to opium in 2010$64...
I've been teaching Af-Pak in my security class these past few weeks. The war has been going on for so long that many "highlights" now seem like distant history.For instance, everyone remembers the farce that was George W. Bush's May 1, 2003, celebration of the end of major combat operations in...
My (first) book, Prisoners of America’s Wars: From the Early Republic to Guantanamo is now shipping on Amazon.com (or Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, etc.). Considering that this would be the closest thing to offspring that I have ever produced, I thought that I would post it in the hope that it may be...
For my first Duck post to be so parochial is a shame, but I can’t resist commenting on the result of Labour’s leadership election, declared a couple of hours ago. For someone such as myself who was once, briefly, one of Ralph Miliband’s students at LSE in the 1960s, the idea that the son of the...
Two cyber warfare trends are catching the eye, but both raise the same major question. First, cyber attacks have been democratised in recent years because of social media and easy to use denial of service attack (DDoS) tools. Popular armies have returned, made up not of a mass of bodies charging,...
My blogging has been light lately as I have been on the road travelling a lot. This recent period has had me travelling like something of a crazy person with trips all over the Centre/East Coast of North America.Part of this trip included some time in Ottawa, where it was some interesting times....
Fourteen civilians and two security officers have now died in Kashmir in violence related to rumors about the "Burn a Koran Day" in Florida. When added to the death in Afghanistan, this brings the total number of deaths to seventeen so far. Many more will die in the coming weeks and months even...
For those of you who do not know, I live in Gainesville, Florida, a college town in Northeast Florida with lots of wonderful things - like a great bunch of colleagues, a great bunch of graduate students, weather to write home about, and a (frequently) rocking football team. It is (largely) a...
The following, unless otherwise specified, result in the taking of one drink for every observation/sighting at the Annual Conference of the American Political Science Association. The Duck of Minerva is not responsible for any liver damage or unfortunate choice of panel questions that may result...
Ah, the viciously gate-keeping peer review, the contemporary equivalent of burning the heretics at the stake. Receiving such a review seems to be a rite of passage in virtually every academic field and discipline of which I am aware, and though the details change, the general theme of such a...
Here at the opening of the new academic year, I sometimes find myself called on to make speeches welcoming students to campus and that sort of thing. I can't resist the opportunity to actually inject a little practical-moral content into what can otherwise be fairly fluffy events, and this year...
Since the Nineties, Indian elites have been increasingly described as "pro-American." While attending a mini-conference of a segment of India's foreign policy and security elite in New Delhi last week, I kept noting how widespread the "pro-American" sentiment seemed to be. In fact, I heard one of...