I’ve been marking essays for the past week (two big advantages of Australian academia: November is a spring month, and second semester ends before Halloween), and a lot of my students were writing about the right to health and what it would take to realize it in a meaningful sense. That, naturally, led me to thinking about cholera. Few diseases can kill as rapidly as cholera. That alone should make it a key issue for global health. What makes...
Last week I was able to host and facilitate a multi-stakeholder meeting of governments, industry and academia to discuss the notions of “meaningful human control” and “appropriate human judgment” as they pertain to the development, deployment and use of autonomous weapons systems (AWS). These two concepts presently dominate discussion over whether to regulate or ban AWS, but neither concept is fully endorsed internationally, despite work from...
An American first lady is about to make history. No, not that one. Nicaragua’s November 6 election has drawn few headlines internationally, but this week the New York Times ran a profile on Rosario Murillo, the first lady who appears on this year’s ballot alongside her husband Daniel Ortega. With the outcome relatively certain, this will be Ortega’s third consecutive term in power, and his fifth time overall leading the country. Constitutional...
I'm on blogging lockdown to GOTV. Back soon.
The joy of blogging is that one can come up with whatever title one wants. An agony of academic publishing is that one cannot do the same for articles published in academic journals. However, getting published is the thing, so I am mighty pleased that the first piece of the Phil/Dave/Steve project on legislatures and oversight over the armed forces of the world's democracies is now published: "Public critic or secretive monitor: party...
With any luck, the myth of Patient Zero being responsible for HIV/AIDS in the US will finally be completely put to rest. Gaétan Dugas may not be a household name for most, but he’s the man who has largely been blamed for HIV/AIDS in the United States. Dugas was a gay French-Canadian airline steward who worked for Air Canada in the 1970s and 1980s. Because his work involved a significant amount of travel and because of the number of his sexual...
Mass media in the US often portray Donald Trump as an American version of Putin, if not his puppet. But it makes sense to take a closer look at the essence of Trump’s and Putin’s appeal to their respective populations. Let’s recap three broad topics: foreign policy, domestic policy, and the economy. Both Putin and Trump focus on ‘foreign policy populism’ trying to sell the idea of great power resurgence. Showing the West “Kuzma’s Mother” has...
We Americans try to resolve the civil wars of other countries--sometimes heroically and successfully, sometimes clumsily, sometimes tragically worsening the violence. But these days, peace needs to start at home. We are in a civil war of words in our country. And not just words. The toxic violence in our political discourse comes amidst actual violence against many. Our presidential campaign has encouraged greater violence rather than...
I've been invited to join the cast of guest bloggers here at Duck of Minerva, and as you may have expected, the first thing I thought of was "well, I've made it, and... now what am I supposed to blog about?" On my personal (yet research-focused) blog, I write about a very broad range of topics: academic writing, time management, literature reviews, surviving academia, and heck, even my own research! But here at the Duck of Minerva I wondered...
When I walk down the street, I don’t see signs saying “Tedros for WHO” or “Vote Szócska.” The television and radio airwaves don’t have endless campaign commercials ending with the tagline, “I’m Flavia Bustreo, and I approve this message.” Sania Nishtar does not hold large public rallies in sports stadiums to bolster her candidacy. Neither David Nabarro nor Philippe Douste-Blazy do phonebanking. These facts don’t distract from the fact that...
The reactions I’ve received to some of my recent op-eds have led me to reconsider the relationship between scholarship and politics, and to question the role of social capital in shaping scholarly opinion. Over the last several months, I have published some pieces that have strayed from what had been my consistent “liberal Zionist” position. One investigated the dark underbelly of Tel Aviv (where I visited the remains of Palestinian villages...
There’s an interesting debate going on over at openGlobalRights. Drawing on their recent Social Problems article, Neve Gordon and Nitza Berkovitch provocatively accuse human rights quantitative scholars of “concealing social wrongs” by using quantitative cross-national data that does not account for the disproportionately high voter disenfranchisement among African Americans. Todd Landman and Chad Clay, two scholars known for their...