This is a guest post by Theo McLauchin (@TheoMcLauchlin), Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Université de Montréal When is a norm not a norm? I ask this question when I read Colin Elman and Arthur Lupia’s vigorous defense of the Data Access & Research Transparency (DA-RT) initiative in APSA’s Comparative Politics section newsletter. I think Elman and Lupia try to have it both ways. Their piece argues, first, that journals need...
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Speed Kills: Why we Need to Hit the Brakes on “Killer Robots”
This is a guest post by Juergen Altmann and Frank Sauer. Juergen Altmann is a Researcher and Lecturer at Technische Universität Dortmund, a specialist in military technology and preventive arms control and among the first scholars to study the military uses of nanotechnology. Frank Sauer is a Senior Research Fellow and Lecturer, Bundeswehr University Munich, a specialist in international security, and is the author of Atomic Anxiety:...
Friday Nerd Blogging: Does Cosplay at Conference Panels Render Pop-Culture Research Less Serious?
An argument broke out about this question after the "Star Wars and International Security" panel at ISA this month. A few people on Twitter and PSRM (or so rumors have it) say dressing up renders pop culture research more marginal than it already is. I suppose a TRIP survey could more conclusively answer the question about trends in the discipline. Personally, I'd love to see that survey, since my new article in Perspectives is all about...
Gender, Rank and IR: Missing Role Models
Last week, I asked a question online that was asked of me and then I asked at the ISA two weeks ago: Can you name women of color working in the US or Canada who do IR and are full professors? At the ISA, folks could only name one or two. On twitter and facebook and my blog since then, the total has increased to eleven: · Neta Crawford of Boston University. · Condoleeza Rice, who was a full prof at Stanford before becoming provost and then...
The Question of Quantum
Tough as it is to follow Charli’s excellent post on terrorism, somebody has to do it and so I might as well. If this past ISA is any indication, quantum is a big deal. The panel on Alex Wendt’s new book linking quantum mechanics to the social sciences was standing room only (from what I hear, I could not be there). James Der Derian has Project Q at the University of Sydney. One of the papers I read as a discussant at ISA invoked the term...
On The Terror and Feeding of Trolls: Or, Why I Aim to be an Equal-Opportunity Non-Reporter of DAESH-Inspired Terrorist Incidents
I was among those last week, after hearing about the events in Brussels, who tweeted or Facebooked in solidarity with Belgium... but also in solidarity with civilians killed in Ankara, Baghdad, Yemen, later that week Cote d'Ivoire and (as of yesterday) in Lahore, Pakistan. I took some flak for this on Twitter and in my personal email. Why can't we just focus on Belgium on a week like this? some people ask? Don't you care about this country and...
Hostile Intent: Civilian Casualties and the Politics of Killing
The expectation that civilians should be protected from the worst excesses of war is traditionally viewed as a moral or legal restraint, moderating the kind of violence that can be inflicted on the battlefield. But the shift towards counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq and its emphasis on population-centric warfare called for a radical rethink in how civilian casualties are framed. Rather than simply viewing them as the tragic but...
Building social science knowledge on public attitudes and autonomous weapons
This is a guest post from Michael C. Horowitz (@mchorowitz), Associate Professor of Political Science and Associate Director of Perry World House, University of Pennsylvania Last week, Charli Carpenter published an important piece advancing the conversation about public attitudes, public conscience, and autonomous weapons. Her post critiqued my recent article in Research & Politics on public opinion and autonomous weapons. As a former Duck...
Autonomous Weapons and Incentives for Oppression
Much of the present debate over autonomous weapons systems (AWS) focuses on their use in war. On one side, scholars argue that AWS will make war more inhumane (Asaro, 2012), that the decision to kill must be a human being’s choice (Sharkey, 2010), or that they will make war more likely because conflict will be less costly to wage with them (Sparrow, 2009). On the other side, scholars argue that AWS will make war more humane, as the weapons will...
How (Not) to Measure the “Public Conscience”
A couple of years ago, Human Rights Watch launched a report arguing for a treaty ban on fully autonomous weapons, claiming military robots who target and kill human beings would violate international law. Among other arguments, the report Losing Humanity cited the Marten’s Clause of the Hague Convention, which encourages states to consider the “dictates of the public conscience” in determining whether as-yet-ungoverned activities were morally...
The Anthropocene and the End of Large Fauna? Will Political Scientists Show Up?
Geologists now say that humans have had such an impact on the earth that we have entered in to a new age, what has been termed the Anthropocene. On some level, this is a political statement, but on another level, it could be an observable layer in the physical surface of the earth that future generations will excavate to find plastics and garbage. This era, and soon, may also spell the end of large fauna. Elephants. Rhinos. Giraffes. Vultures....
Is it possible to be a realist?
Some weeks ago, Stephen Walt lamented the absence of realist commentators in the American media space. What was striking to me at the time was Walt’s claim that realism is a ‘well-known approach to foreign policy.’ That claim—that realism is a foreign policy approach—makes sense in the context of Walt’s dirge, which focuses on the role of policy makers and media in shaping state behavior. But putting realism into a foreign policy context does...