The diplomatic dustup over Syria brought Russia in from the cold but simultaneously froze any notion that western allies were getting their strategic act together. Nonetheless, although the mistakes in the U.S. and UK’s approach to building support at home and abroad for an intervention in Syria confused leaders and citizens alike, these mistakes should not be interpreted as an abrupt turn-around in their and their allies' strategic thinking....
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Miss Universe is Like Other International Organizations…except the members are half naked
Last week Dan Drezner asked What Does Miss Universe Tell us About World Politics in 2013? The post starts off on a positive note- that one can find politics anywhere- before it descends into one of the most classic examples of gender-avoidance/oblivion I've read in ages. Drezner swiftly calls on "the most qualified person on earth" to outsource engaging on a lady topic write the remaining post. I felt like I was back at uni and my male...
Friday Nerd Blogging: Lost in Furniture
Given the low salaries many of us start out at, we probably overly identify with the crisis contained within this trailer (no significant spoilers):
Thursday Morning Linkage – Special Typhoon Haiyan Edition
This week, more news from the relief effort and typhoon Haiyan and how the events in the Philippines threaten to overshadow the on-going climate negotiations in Warsaw. The Security and Relief Situation on the Ground U.S. military ramps up aid to Philippines with up to 1,000 soldiers likely on the ground from Okinawa in short order, ferrying Filipino troops and aid supplies Plenty of gasoline but gas stations won't open for fear of looting;...
The inevitability of transnational racial profiling?
Today's thought experiment: A foreign national is killed in your state, igniting emotional protests and a road blockade by members of his community. Your state is almost entirely economically dependent on tourism. There's standard boilerplate for these events, right? You express regret, you pledge to investigate the murder, you vow that locals who violently attacked protesters will also be brought to justice. Now imagine that it was a Nigerian...
The Pop 5: feminism at a pop culture glance
The Pop 5 is a new 'test' series of posts touching on events in pop culture and linking them back (briefly, hopefully, and sometimes loosely) to IR and politics. The posts are meant to be LIGHT, but also to take seriously the influence of popular culture on how we understand the world. It is, after all, one of the dominant lenses through which our students frame IR. I'm a self diagnosed pop culture addict with a list of shameful (and juicy)...
Parsing the Anti-Drone Debate
As captured in the final images of this important new documentary, there seem to be at least three different debates going on about drones: The first is reflected in a recent op-ed titled "Five Ways Obama Could Fix Drones Right Now." Here, Sarah Holewinski of CIVIC and Larry Lewis, a Center for Naval Analyses researcher whose classified data on drone deaths made headlines a few months back, argue that the US' drone strike policy is ok on its...
Tuesday Linkage
Killer Robot Blogging: This week, NGOs are massing in Geneva to encourage states party to the Convention on Conventional Weapons to consider banning autonomous weapons under the auspices of this treaty. This follows the UN Disarmament Committee meetings in New York in October, where multiple countries expressed concern about this issue. As in New York, NGO campaigners will be holding side events and briefings in Geneva to press their claim that...
The Endlessly Fatiguing Japanese-Korean Squabbling is the Worst it’s been in Decades
I am so burned out on this issue, I’m ready to say we should just nuke the Liancourt Rocks (left) to end this whole thing. But it’s everywhere now in the regional media. Park pointedly won’t meet Abe, which the Japanese media is reading as a huge snub. She even said she’d talk to Pyongyang before Tokyo (yikes!). The Japanese are getting more open in expressing loathing for Korea. The Americans are livid. And the Chinese and Norks are loving it...
Postscript on Typhoon Haiyan: Hazard Vulnerability, Disasters, and Security
I found two pieces that asked similar questions to my earlier post on why this typhoon appeared to be so destructive and why similar storms in Asia are especially deadly. Both raise interesting questions for scholars of security studies and environmental politics. Max Fisher raises a similar set of concerns in the Washington Post asking why the Philippines wasn't more ready. Beyond the sheer size of the storm and the country's poverty, he also...
a bear in duck’s clothing: reflections on the end of my blogging career
Blogging is an exercise of academic freedom, like writing journal articles or books. Blogging is something that has evolving norms and rules, like writing journal articles or books. However, given its nature, the evolution of the field, and the evolution of technology, the norms of blogging are, for better or worse, unique. It is the question of what those norms are and what they demand of us that has dominated the significant discussion about...
Monday Evening Linkage
Transgender Veterans are fighting to get their military paperwork to match their preferred gender identity. This raises SO many interesting and important issues for the US military- ones that it will have to face. For example, discharge papers -which may include an individuals former gender identifier- are used for future employment, benefits, funeral instructions etc. A recent Gallup poll revealed that Americans still prefer a male boss- and...