state takes precedence over their own lives. Focusing on states as persons distracts us from how violence travels across levels of analysis. States don’t do violence to one another. They inflict violence on actual living beings.
In some sense, it is with a heavy heart that I write my last permanent contributor blog post at the Duck. I’ve loved being with the Ducks these past years, and I’ve appreciated being able to write...
The next US presidential elections are around the corner and the Democrat US President has already announced that he will not run for the Presidency again. He defines himself as pro-choice, and it...
It seems that “totalitarianism” is everywhere these days. I suppose that is the point of totalitarianism. Nonetheless, the buzzword has seen a remarkable resurgence in popular usage and misusage in...
G. John Ikenberry has a post up at TPMCafe on what he terms the "security trap". The piece argues that a number of major changes (American Unipolarity, a 'revolution' in the concept of state sovereignty, lack of common threat as in the Cold War, and the rise of a more democratic international...
The BBC (via FP Passport, my new favorite 'msm' blog) is reporting that Iran and Russia may have yet again reached a deal to shift the enrichment of Iranian uranium to Russia.Iran's ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Ali Asghar Soltanieh, told Iranian radio he had struck...
Yesterday, Kevin Drum had an interesting piece on the failure of the Bush administration to take Iran up on an offer to talk about its weapons program and support for anti-Israeli terrorists shortly after the President declared the end of 'major hostilities' in Iraq. The story goes that Tehran...
After having previously vowed to speak candidly with Chinese President Hu Jintao about affording more political and social freedom to Chinese citizens, President Bush managed to miss a golden opportunity and let diplomatic nicety get in the way.Most should by now be aware of the vocal protester...
Chinese President Hu Jintao is in town to meet with our own commander-in-chief and while I am sure most people are focusing on the more visible issues of trade, currency valuation, and nuclear proliferation I like to look at the apparently insignificant, yet likely-to-cause-diplomatic-hay types of...
The Atlantic Monthly recently asked a group of foreign policy "insiders" a number of questions about US foreign policy. The poll results were in the April 2006 issue, which is hidden behind a subscriber wall. The magazine greatly limited the possible poll answers. For example, the insiders were...
Thanks to Dan, I read the interesting AU piece about Patrick. This is what caught my eye:“We wouldn’t have a car culture if it weren’t for superhighways,” he says. “The whole idea of being able to drive a car depends on the existence of a certain set of infrastructures. Material infrastructures,...
Back in 1976, the eminent political scientist Robert Dahl pointed out a common error in the analysis of power among social theorists: the tendency to assume that power was a unit-level attribute, something that a unit or actor possessed in isolation. This was hardly a new observation, but Dahl did...
Check it out as American University promotes our very own Patrick Jackson. For example:It was Jackson’s dedication toward students that brought him to AU. Attracted by the school’s emphasis on instruction and the opportunity to teach a course on his beloved science fiction (as it relates to world...
The Chronicle reports on a rather old problem in the electronic peer-review process: editors, authors, and reviewers forwarding Word documents without scrubbing the properties, tracked changes, and other sources of embedded data likely to reveal a writer's or reviewer's identity. Henry Farrell...
During the late 1980s and the 1990s academic international relations was dominated by the so-called "paradigm wars." Scholars argued over -- and oriented their writings towards -- the major three "isms": realism, liberalism, and constructivism.[1]The degree to which arguments about the "isms"...
The role of insults -- and the corrolary role of honor -- in world politics represents an odd topic in international-relations scholarship. Everyone knows insults and honor matter a great deal. Some scholars write about them -- or, at least, related topics like "prestige" -- but no one seems to be...