Too good and with the finale coming up, we need to double dip:
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An Academic Woman’s Rant of the Week: Negotiation
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...
Friday Nerd Blogging: GoT Music
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.
Path Dependence, Iraq Edition
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,...
Don’t Confuse Me With the Facts: Costs of Lethal Autonomous Weapons
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...
The Unwritten Rules of AMERICAN IR? (or, things American IR scholars don’t always know about ‘doing’ IR ‘in the rest of the world’)
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'-...
Happy Belated Birthday To Lawyers, Guns and Money
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...
The Public “Conscience” and Killer Robots
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...
Bergdahl and the Band of Brothers Dilemma: understanding the ‘patriot’/’traitor’ debate
Let's be honest, the circumstances surrounding the 'prisoner swap' between Bowe Bergdahl and five high-ranking Taliban prisoners in Guantanamo Bay just don't add up. The initial narrative President Obama pitched of the prisoner swap as a signal of successful negotiations, a necessary response for a fellow soldier whose health was in jeopardy, and further evidence that the 'war' in Afghanistan is indeed drawing to a close, has completely...
Discourse Analysis of Internet Trolls?: the whys and hows of analyzing online content*
Online mediums can be perceived as attracting wacky ranters unrepresentative contributors and exchanges and, therefore, forums or chats are often treated as if they do not provide an effective picture/sample of political discourse. But since over 80% of Americans are online, 66% of American adults have engaged in civil or political activities with social media, and about half of those who visit discussion groups post/contribute, isn't this an...
Brazil Linkage
Here are some stories we've been reading about Brazil: Street artist captures iconic image of impending World Cup (see mural above) Rio residents ambivalent about the World Cup Datafolha poll of people in Sao Paulo: 76% of people say Brazil is not prepared to host the World Cup. 22% say ready or partially ready. — Gabriel Elizondo (@elizondogabriel) May 22, 2014 Sao Paulo experiencing incredible drought, reservoir down to 8% of capacity...
Notes from Brazil
A long overdue post from Brazil. I've been here about two weeks, first in Rio and have just concluded the second week in the Amazonian city of Belém. I hope to come back with more substantive thoughts about the country's direction, but here are some preliminary thoughts. The Brazilians we met were somewhat ambivalent about the World Cup. Many of them expressed the concern that this was a lot of money that the country could have used to address...