(Photo by Oliver Weiken—EPA) What's the Israeli plan with all of this? According to the Israeli Defense Forces statement, "The IDF's objective as defined by the Israeli government (in the ground offensive) is to establish a reality in which Israeli residents can live in safety and security without continuous indiscriminate terror, while striking a significant blow to Hamas' terror infrastructure." Despite the somewhat ambiguous language here,...
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Friday Nerd Blogging: Force for Change
A depressing series of news days lately. What can make us feel good? Jon Stewart? Stephen Colbert? Star Wars? How about all three? Yet another reason to regret leaving San Diego--where the Force for Change ends at Comic-Con. May the force ever be in your odds!
Thursday Linkage: Hey! A Non-World Cup/Brazil post
I'm ready to move on from Brazil and football/soccer news. Really I am. Here are some links related to climate change and I've thrown in a link to Will Moore's post about using satellite rain data rather than rain gauge data to track rainfall (the latter may be subject to variation due to conflict. Hard to collect rain gauge data in conflict zones!). In other news, Australia votes to repeal carbon tax, while lots of action afoot to deal with...
Meanwhile in Cambodia: The Detention of Mu Sochua
Mu Sochua a leading member of the opposition Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP) was arrested on Tuesday along with five others after a demonstration to gain access to Phnom Penh's Freedom Park turned violent in clashes between police and some of the protesters. Sochua was elected to the Cambodian parliament in 2013 and is a leading human rights and non-violence advocate in Cambodia. Despite their calls on the protesters to remain calm and...
Rape-Stoves, Techno-Rationality and Global Humanitarian Policy
Samer Abdelnour and Akbar Saeed have published a terrific article in International Political Sociology. "Technologizing Humanitarian Space: Darfur Advocacy and the Rape-Stove Panacea" critically traces the emergence of fuel-efficient cook-stoves as a global "solution" to sexual violence in refugee camps. Here's the abstract: We examine how an unassuming domestic technology—the fuel-efficient stove—came to be construed as an effective tool for...
Gaza Thinkage, Outside-The-Box
Lots of ink is being spilled over Gaza. Watching and reading, I am reminded of something I read early in my career, while writing my second book. This thing I read was a manual for reporters, written by veteran British war correspondents Annabel McGoldrick and Jake Lynch. Jaded by knowledge of how the media can exacerbate or dampen conflicts, their manual contained specific suggestions for producing "peace journalism." For example, McGoldrick...
Germany Didn’t Win the World Cup.
Germany won the Men's World Cup. The other half of the tournament takes place next year, in Canada. Calling the men's half of the tournament 'The' World Cup while excluding half the world's population including some of the best players in the world is really nothing more than gendered language at its sexist best. At Huffington Post last week, Jezebel's Valerie Alexander penned a terrific piece on why this semantic distinction is so important:...
Non-Academic Job Searches in DC – What to Know
Many graduate students are expanding their job searches outside the academy. As an advisor, I'm horribly underprepared at offering job advice outside of the academic job market – besides work you can get off of Craigslist, I've never held a real job. Recently, I had a student come to me with questions about finding a job in the DC policy world. I asked my great friend (and former student) Kate Kidder for her thoughts, which she agreed to...
Cylons and Dragons and Norms, Oh My
Rob Farley and I talk on BloggingheadsTV about new books (his and mine); the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots; how political scientists might study the circulation of science fiction and fantasy in real-world politics; and the meaning of Game of Thrones' fourth season.
Friday Nerd Blogging: Laugh It Up Fuzzball Edition
What epitomizes American summer more than baseball? Star Wars! Well, Star Wars + baseball: Star Wars night at a Cardinals game!
Justice, Peace and Finger-Pointing
This is a guest post by Ari Kohen, Associate Professor of Political Science at University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He blogs at Running Chicken and tweets @kohenari. As I write this, Twitter and Facebook inform me that air raid sirens are going off in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, as well as several cities and towns closer to the Gaza Strip, while Israeli forces have launched air strikes against Gaza and are considering the mobilization of as many as...
The New Blitzkrieg, Part II
As I wrote a few days ago, a new pattern of warfare is emerging in the Middle East and Africa. This “new blitzkrieg” isn’t really new, but it is asymmetric warfare at its best, pitting swarms of fast-moving, lightly armed fighters operating as a network against hidebound hierarchies of Western-trained and equipped “professional soldiers”. These state forces have a bad track record of crumbling under the tempo of swarming, networked attackers;...