The New Scientist reports that Russia has announced it will deploy fully autonomous lethal robots as guards around missile bases. Several countries already have autonomous sentry technology (the US, Israel and South Korea) but [UPDATED: if this report is accurate, it suggests Russia might be the first country to announce] it will openly deploy such weapons without a human in the loop. The reported announcement comes at an important moment in...
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Yale Ferguson Award
[Note: This is a guest post by Daniel Nexon]. This is a call for nominations for the third annual Yale H. Ferguson Award, presented by the International Studies Association-Northeast. Information below the fold: The Yale H. Ferguson Award, presented by International Studies Association-Northeast, recognizes the book that most advances the vibrancy of international studies as a pluralist discipline. Any book or edited volume published within the...
The Bloody Secession of Eastern Ukraine
[Note: This is a guest post by Branislav L. Slantchev, professor of Political Science at the University of California-San Diego] Anna Pechenkina has written an insightful response to my opinion that if the West cares about Ukraine’s pro-Western orientation and integrity (at least what remains after Crimea), then we and the Ukrainians need to brace ourselves for a risky confrontation with Putin’s Russia: Kiev must ask for, and we must agree to,...
Academic Parenting 101: parental leave erosion
Academics are generally pretty lucky when it comes to parental leave- at least on paper. Many universities provide more leave than the minimum required by governments (so more than nothing in the US), yet there are several aspects of our careers that cause parental leave erosion. I should say from the outset that I had a generally supportive and positive experience while on leave last year, but I've also found several sources of leave erosion....
Doing the Stability-Instability Dance
The stability-instability paradox is a concept from nuclear deterrence land: that if two sides both have nuclear weapons that can survive a first strike, it might just create deterrence at the strategic level AND free up both sides to engage in violence at lower levels. Sounds just like an air-headed theory that would never happen in reality because, you know, NUKES!* * To be clear, I have not studied deterrence theory closely since grad...
Sadly for Ukraine, The West Does Not Have Important Interests There
Editor's note: this is a guest post by Anna O. Pechenkina, Post-Doctoral Fellow, Dept of Social and Decision Sciences, Carnegie Mellon University. It is primarily a response to an essay Branislav Slantchev recently posted on his personal website. Branislav Slantchev advocates for NATO troops to be stationed in Eastern Ukraine to preserve western strategic interests in the region. The logic is that if NATO troops establish a "tripwire" in...
Thursday Linkage: Earth Day edition
Johannes gave a spirited and optimistic take on Earth Day, which was Tuesday April 22nd. I think as an advocacy strategy that an optimistic call to arms strikes the right tone. One of the core findings from some framing studies carried out in the early 2000s suggested that overwhelmingly negative messages on issues like climate change leave people feeling fatalistic. This fatalism was on display this week when I advertised a yearlong MA class...
Classroom Activity: When Silence Says a Lot
This activity comes after students are to have listened to a lecture (slides) on international institutions, specifically the impact they have on patterns of armed conflict. The first half focused on peacekeeping, which works better (under some conditions) than many appreciate, while the latter focused on how international institutions can deter bad behavior even if they lack enforcement power. The argument, which I previously laid out (in a...
Zucotti Park Redux: An Earth Day Field Report
"Frack Wall Street, Not Our Water" "The People Are Rising, No More Compromising" "Hey Hey, Ho Ho, Fossil Fuels Have to Go" It's Earth Day, and I am in Zucotti Park holding some parsley given to me by an unknown activist, chanting "oceans are rising, no more compromising!" with about 200 other people. It's the beginning of Global Climate Convergence, and I decided to do some field research on the status of the grassroots climate movement. We...
Tuesday Linkage
Editor's note: this post previously appeared on my personal blog. I've been doing links posts on Tuesdays over there for a while now, so I guess I might as well start cross-listing them. 1. Excellent post by Reed Wood on targeting civilians in war. In it, he discusses two recent papers (one by himself and my colleague Jake Kathman, another by fellow PSU PhD Jakana Thomas) showing that insurgents who kill civilians—who resort to terrorism—do...
Can Research Inform Climate Policy? A Columbia University Workshop
For me, yesterday's main activity was a home game workshop on the policy implications of research on climate policy. I co-organized the workshop with Alex Ovodenko and Scott Barrett, both of whom are active in the climate policy research community. We had a group of about 30 people, both academics and practitioners. The six presentations focused on climate negotiations, carbon clubs, and carbon markets. Why such a workshop? As some of you may...
Sanction Threats, Imposition, and Protest
Editor's note: a more detailed version of this post previously appeared on my personal blog. If sanctions are to succeed as a tool of coercive diplomacy, they must impose real costs on the target. Yet, in most cases, they fail to do this—at least, directly. The economic costs tend to fall disproportionately on the average person, while the regime and its elite supports often find ways to benefit from newly emergent black markets. But might...