The Guardian article this week that disclosed the story of U.S. eavesdropping on the leaders of several US allies said that the surveillance produced "little reportable intelligence." This isn't really a surprise -- I can't really imagine that listening to German Chancellor Merkel's phone conversations are going to give US analysts and policymakers a whole lot more than they get from open source and normal diplomatic channels. So why does the...
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Friday Nerd Blogging Extra: Just Some Good Advice
Watch Game of Thrones or you might be foolish enough to dare a mighty Khal to engage in a slap game.
The power of mentorship: a reflection
In the Monkey Cage’s recent symposium on gender and political science, David Lake writes how important it is that our scholarly networks become less gendered, how male scholars must make an effort to mentor women in the field. In my view, the importance of mentorship cannot be understated. Without the support of several scholars in security studies, not all but many of them men, I may have indeed decided that this field was not for someone...
Engineering Peace
Can third parties do more than foster temporary, unstable ceasefires? Without perpetually holding the belligerents at arms' length via heavily militarized buffer zones? Is it possible to make peace self-enforcing at a reasonably low cost? Recent work on conflict management suggests not. Less intrusive approaches to mediation, such as information provision, fail to solve the problem that poses an obstacle to efficient negotiate between the...
Friday Nerd Blogging: Indiana Jones and the Plot Hole of Power
Two CBS sitcoms have references Indiana Jones in the past couple of weeks: How I Met Your Mother invoked Last Crusade as Barney imagined that Ted and he entered the room where the grail and the fake grails were stored at the end of Last Crusade. The ghostly knight kept playing a role, telling Ted in "reality" that he was choosing poorly. Not a bad bit. Big Bang Theory had the Amy Farrah Fowler character bust a big plot hole in Raiders,...
Thursday Morning Linkage
Here is your morning linkage with stories on energy and the environment, conservation, conflict in Africa, and health. Energy and Environment Alex Wang on the really bad air in the Chinese city of Harbin, buses getting lost, school canceled, video here 4.5% drop in GHG emissions in the U.S. between 2011 and 2012, but methane rising in shale gas producing states? Questions about whether China is last best hope for carbon capture and storage...
So you want to move to the United Kingdom…
Its 2013, the U.S. government was recently shut down for almost two weeks. The National Science Foundation will only fund grants if you can help the U.S. build operational transformers or drones that can make targeted killing choices. The movement to replace full time faculty with part time adjuncts has sapped the open jobs on the market leading to the common Facebook refrain - "worst job market ever." Political theory is openly despised in...
The Duck of Minerva is blocked in China
I was just in China for a work thing, when I checked the Duck for something. Turns out the Duck is screened out by the Great Firewall. Even if you go to Google Search Hong Kong, it’s still blocked. Wow. Who knew even nerdy IR theory and pop culture references posed a threat to CCP rule? Lame. Even more lame - my own website, which gets way less traffic, is blocked too. For sites as small as mine, that’s almost a complement – hah. If only I had...
Do Cyborgs Dream of Electric Femme-Bots?
[Note: This is a guest post by Lauren Wilcox, Lecturer in Gender Studies at University of Cambridge, and author of "Machines that Matter: The Politics and Ethics of ‘Unnatural’ Bodies" in Iver Neumann and Nicholas Kiersey eds, Battlestar Galactica and International Relations, Routledge 2012] In a recent blog post on the Monkey Cage, Heather Roff-Perkins is concerned that military robots are being built with masculine characteristics. She is...
Advancing Global Environmental Governance
[Note: This is a guest post by Peter M. Haas of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst] Transboundary and global environmental threats require collection action. Concretely, this means developing forms of governance that apply common rules, norms and decision making procedures. Ideally, such governance should be resilient in the sense that it is able to persist over time and respond quickly and accurately to new threats. Yet the record of...
Another Great Video – Why You Should NEVER Lecture from the Book’s Slides
My first semester teaching as a PhD'd professor was tough - I was constantly struggling to stay on top of my research responsibilities and my family responsibilities. Add in teaching 2 new preps - something had to give! Well, I thought I found a solution - the textbook I was using for Intro to IR had already-made Powerpoint presentations! All I needed to do was change the name and date on the slides and - Voilà! - teaching duties done!...
Tuesday Linkage
Killer Robots: Wired reports on developments in autonomous weaponry, quoting military personnel who say the idea is to think of them "not as tools but as members of the squad." Video gamers collaboratively solved a decade-old puzzle about the complex structure of an enzyme relevant to HIV-AIDS research, suggesting human spatial reasoning is superior to algorithms: a point not at all lost on those who think putting complex situational life and...