Last Monday, on May the 4th, citizens around the globe celebrated International Star Wars Day. In honor of this important event, Patrick Thaddeus Jackson and I are pleased to announce an International Studies Association 2016 Conference panel on Star Wars for next year's meeting. We seek paper abstracts examining the relationship between the Star Wars franchise and socio-political dynamics in the area of international security, broadly defined....
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Iconic Wildlife Species Threatened With Extinction
I've been MIA of late on the blog, mostly a function of end-of-term obligations. I've led a year-long graduate course on global wildlife conservation (course blog here). If you haven't followed the news of late, iconic wildlife species like rhinos and elephants are threatened with extinction, mostly because rising incomes in China and Vietnam in particular are allowing more people to satisfy their desires for wildlife products. Since the late...
The “Future” of “Global” “Security” “Studies”
Last Friday, I had the great pleasure to attend a workshop on "The Future of Global Security Studies" at University of Denver's Sie Center for International Security and Diplomacy. The event brought together authors for the inaugral special issue of ISA's new journal, the Journal of Global Security Studies, which promises to showcase new research and new thinking in security studies, but also to bring diverse perspectives into dialogue. As...
Development and Security
For a range of reasons, I have been thinking lately about the relationship between development and security. At one level, the relationship is obvious, if somewhat banal: resources allocated for security (e.g. guns) cannot be used for development purposes (butter). I suspect that for many American IR scholars, and certainly most Americans in security studies, that is the limit of their thinking on the relationship. If we think about security in...
It’s the Biggest National Threat and We Can’t Help You
The Department of Defense’s (DoD) new Cyber Strategy is a refinement of past attempts at codifying and understanding the “new terrain” of cybersecurity threats to the United States. While I actually applaud many of the acknowledgements in the new Strategy, I am still highly skeptical of the DoD’s ability to translate words to deeds. In particular, I am so because the entire Strategy is premised on the fact that the “DoD cannot defend every...
Not All Alarms are False
This piece raises the question I have been asking for the past week in Brussels: can we credibly commit to the defense of the Baltics? Without a permanent NATO (or at least American) presence, is our Article V commitment (an attack upon one is an attack upon all) believable? There are two ways to look at it. First, to be clear, any nuclear threat is incredible. That is--not to be believed. At any single point, it really is not that...
The New Mineshaft Gap: Killer Robots and the UN
This past week I was invited to speak as an expert at the United Nations Informal Meeting of Experts under the auspices of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW). The CCW’s purpose is to limit or prohibit certain conventional weapons that are excessively injurious or have indiscriminate effects. The Convention has five additional protocols banning particular weapons, such as blinding lasers and cluster bombs. Last week’s meetings...
The Freedom to Speak Up As Academics: The Right to Make An “Ass” of Myself Personally
On Thursday, I became part of a growing group of academics that has had a letter like this written about them: As a parent, I’ve been doing some advocacy about my children’s school this year. The advocacy received some local media attention recently when my children’s District Administration tried to defend an activity that violated federal privacy rights. Luckily, I’m in a department where, instead of encouraging me to be silent, senior...
Comparing World Crises
On my second day in Belgium, the Atlantik-Brücke conference, a Canada-Germany conversation, got underway and was immediately quite interesting. The opening session had two speakers that provided broad surveys of the world's crises, and I was struck that there seemed to be some comparisons that did not work for me. Why? Because some crises are harder than others and that we can focus on three dimensions of each crisis so that we can compare...
There is No Lone Wolf Terrorism: but there is anxiety about brown men, loneliness, and mental illness
There's something about 'lone wolf terrorism' debates that stinks. I can't quite find a singular source of the smell, but after further investigation, it seems the relatively recent surge in the use of the category 'lone wolf' to describe individual acts of political violence draws on extremely rank racist, sexist, and alarmist logic. When you compare the sparse literature on lone wolf terrorism and the slough of articles on the topic, one...
Friday Nerd Blogging: Game of Thrones Returns
To celebrate the return of Game of Thrones, which is chock full of IR, I am posting a cartoon and a video (spoilers and NSFW language lurk below the break): And for Key and Peele's take on the show: Enjoy the next ten weeks of GoT!
Gender in IR, Now at the Cutting Edge
[Note: The following is a guest post by Prof. Dan Reiter of Emory University] Joshua Goldstein wrote in the preface to his award-winning, 2001 book War and Gender that while finishing his book he “discovered a list of unfinished research projects, which I had made fifteen years ago at the end of graduate school. About ten lines down is ‘gender and war,’ with the notation ‘most interesting of all; will ruin career—wait until tenure.’” This was...