Over the weekend, Donald Trump gave an interview with Michael Gove of The Times of London and Kai Diekmann, a former editor of the German newspaper Bild. (The interview is behind a paywall, but you can register for free for access to two articles a week from The Times.) There has been ample coverage in the press (see here, here), focusing on Trump's ambivalence to NATO ("obsolete" "very important"), hostility to the European Union ("Personally,...
This World Politics in a Time of Populist Nationalism (WPTPN) guest post is written by Malliga Och and Jennifer M. Piscopo. Dr. Och (on Twitter @malligao) is an Assistant Professor in the Global Studies and Languages Department at Idaho State University. Her research focus on women’s political representation in conservative parties and she is the co-editor with Shauna Shames of The Right Women. Republican Activists, Candidates, and...
Amidst all the political drama this week, one could be forgiven for not noting the 25th anniversary of the Chapultepec Peace Agreement. Chapultepec was the agreement that brought a negotiated end to El Salvador’s civil war, a 12-year conflict between a repressive military government and leftist rebels united under the banner of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). The Salvadoran conflict was notable for its tremendous human...
Happy Birthday to Dr. Martin Luther King! In his honor here is his favorite singer, the majestic Mahalia Jackson, singing the theme song for the civil rights movement--"We Shall Overcome." After that I've posted Dr. King's soul shaking spoken word reflection on that song. All together they're five minutes long and well worth a listen. Mahalia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTyKJjj2oC0 Martin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=130J-FdZDtY
I was reminded on twitter that international relations professors have trained students for generations to focus on the third and second levels of analysis and dismiss the first--that individuals and their characteristics matter much less than the constraining impact of institutions and the incentives provided by the international system. So, should we just apologize as Trump sells out the postWWII order and ends American hegemony by whim or...
In the wake of the failed attempt at passing a boycott resolution (of Israeli academic institutions) at the recent MLA conference, here are some thoughts. (Readers of the Duck might be aware that last year’s ISA conference saw a modest attempt at bringing a discussion on BDS forward. That proposal was also voted down.) Let’s talk (past each other)! The debate over the academic boycott is often frustratingly unproductive. On one hand, some...
Having recently attended a workshop and conference on beneficial artificial intelligence (AI), one of the overriding concerns is how to design beneficial AI. To do this, the AI needs to be aligned with human values, and as such is known, pace Stuart Russell, as the “Value Alignment Problem.” It is a “problem” in the sense that however one creates an AI, the AI may try to maximize a value to the detriment of other socially useful or even...
I used to be a Senate staffer, and one of the most interesting parts of my job was helping Senators prepare for hearings. If I were a Senate staffer now, here’s hearing questions I’d recommend for President-Elect Trump’s national security nominees, Rex Tillerson (Secretary of State), General James Mattis (Secretary of Defense), and General John Kelly (Secretary of Homeland Security). These questions would serve as starting points for dialogue...
For the past few months, I've been observing with horror all the cabinet appointments in the incoming Trump administration and the Theresa May government . As someone who originally did a PhD with the intent to become a career diplomat (and yes, I realize there's a foreign civil service pathway to achieve precisely that goal), to me expertise in top-level agencies was more than a mere technicality: it was a requirement. I wanted a PhD in...
To be clear, the latest news is "intra-civilian" but is likely to cross over given the stakes. Remember the old days where the "smart" Bolsheviks left the personnel and other boring issues to Stalin? Yeah, so Stalin staffed the new Soviet government with his guys, and the theorists, well, they did not end up this way. That might be too bloody of an example, but I am not at all surprised that General (retired) Mattis is having tensions with...
In conversations with friends, I quickly realized that the International Studies Association faces some significant problems ahead. The advent of the Trump administration is likely to lead to two kinds of complications: it may be hard for foreign scholars to get visas to attend the conference that scholars may want to boycott conferences that take place in the US if Trump follows through on a variety of things he promised/threatened/tweeted...
Consider these two presidential statements: “Happy New Year to all, including to my many enemies and those who have fought me and lost so badly they just don’t know what to do. Love!”—President-Elect Donald Trump’s New Year’s Twitter greeting “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of our affection.”—President Abraham Lincoln, from his first inaugural address Both...