Two weeks ago as part of our class, we visited Brasilia's landfill site, known as Lixão, which again underscored some of the incredible contradictions in the country. It is a vast site, with six open dumping sites, this is one of the largest landfills in all of Latin America. Controversy surrounds this landfill, as it is slated to be closed and moved some 45km away. The government is shutting down landfills like this one in favor of lined...
**This is a guest post by Dr. Christopher Neff, Lecturer in Public Policy at University of Sydney.** This past week President Obama marked one year since legislative efforts at gun control failed in the Congress. He lamented at the normalization of school shootings in the United States, noting, “my biggest frustration is that this society has not been willing to take some basic steps to keep guns out of the hands of people who can do...
For a perspective on how global civil society might better mobilized for armed violence reduction read this new report, by a Brazilian humanitarian disarmament NGO, Instituto SoudaPaz. "What's Next?" is both an up-to-date manifesto on the importance and political tactics by which small arms advocates might more meaningfully influence global debate and policy, and a reflection on the nature, challenges and promise of global civil society...
So, at this point, I've been all over Brazil, though that's like saying I've toured the United States in five weeks. That said, I've been in five or six cities all over the country (I'll load a better map soon), and the internet speed has invariably been crap, even in pretty expensive hotels. I'm not sure what that tells you about the country's fortunes in the 21st century, but it does mean access to information and commerce in Brazil is...
Too good and with the finale coming up, we need to double dip:
Sorry, faithful Duck readers, for the radio silence – I’ve been traveling for much of the last month and then – ugh – just started teaching a daily undergrad class. I promise – real blog posts are coming! In the meantime, I wanted to fill you in on some information I’ve been digesting in the last month. The information should be enough for all of us to “rant” about. A few weeks ago, I was at the Vision in Methodology conference – a wonderful...
With the finale of this season of Game of Thrones upon us, I thought this take on the theme might be a suitable Friday Nerd entry.
With the fall of Mosul to the jihadists of Syria and Iraq, there is much blame-casting to be had. Some are blaming Obama for not keeping a residual force in Iraq although it is not clear that a small US force would have kept the Iraqi military from breaking. This always, always frustrates me because it ignores what the US faced in 2009--the accumulation of dynamics produced by the bad decisions of the past. In this case, if people remember,...
This is a guest post by Heather Roff-Perkins, Visiting Associate Professor at the Josef Korbel School, University of Denver. On June 12, Christof Heyns, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, will brief the United Nations Human Rights Council on the human rights implications of lethal autonomous weapons. Last month, member states were likewise briefed by panels of experts at an informal meeting under the...
Laura Sjoberg recently wrote a post listing "The Unwritten Rules of IR." While it is an interesting review of some of the power relations, maneuvering, and indeed game-playing that goes on in the field, it also captured a particular American (maybe even just a personal) experience of being an IR scholar. Of course this makes sense, since Sjoberg is an American doing IR in America...but it felt a little bit more like 'Mean Girls- the IR Sequel'-...
One of my favorite blogs turned ten this past weekend. Lawyers, Guns and Money was an early entrant to the IR blogosphere and Rob Farley and his crew are some of its most well-known voices. Last weekend they ran a series of anniversary reflections which I hope you'll surf on over and read. They're all amazing, funny, heart-twanging, and Rob's in particular has a lot of history and depth to it and some nice reflections on how the blogosphere has...
At my side event presentation at the UN CCW Experts Meeting on Autonomous Weapons last month, I presented public opinion data showing strong US opposition to the idea of deploying such weapons. Since the panel was specifically focused on "morality and ethics" and since my remarks were on measuring the public "conscience" per se rather than public opinion in general, I re-examined my coding of open-ended comments with a view toward whether...