(Note: This post is cross-posted at the Columbia University Press Authors' Blog) Over the last couple of years, the US military has begun to employ FETs (Female Engagement Teams) in Afghanistan, characterizing their purpose as "to engage the female populace" of the country. The mission of these groups of female soldiers seems to be divided between victim services, trust building, influence seeking, and intelligence gathering. Many feminist...
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Duck Forum on Teaching US Foreign Policy
Duck of Minerva is pleased to announce the start of a four-part series of posts on teaching US Foreign Policy. The forum includes contributions from the authors of major undergraduate textbooks on U.S. foreign policy: Bruce Jentleson (Duke University), Steven Hook (Kent State), Jim McCormick (Iowa State), and James Scott (Texas Christian) and Jerel Rosati (University of South Carolina). Bruce Jentleson initiated and coordinated the forum --...
Duck Forum on Teaching US Foreign Policy #1
[Note: This is a guest post by Bruce Jentleson from Duke University. It is the first in a four-part forum on teaching US Foreign Policy.] Six Concepts in Teaching American Foreign Policy by Bruce Jentleson As the Cold War went on, among scholars and teachers of American foreign policy there was some settling in to a sense that we knew the questions – containment? nuclear deterrence? Bretton Woods stability? ---- and were mostly debating the...
Creative Rebranding? Human Rights vs. Human Security
I had a boy break up with me once by saying “we’re not breaking up, we’re taking a break.” I guess the boy assumed that “taking a break” would be easier for me to accept than “breaking up.” He was right: it took me a while[1] to actually figure out that “taking a break” was really synonymous with “breaking up.” For my teenage-girl angst, “taking a break” just sounded better. For the boy, “taking a break” was probably the safer option. In...
Review of Braumoeller’s The Great Powers and the International System
The following is an all too common path through graduate school: spend 3-9 months wondering what the heck you signed up for and why realize that every topic you're interested in has been written on and assume there's nothing left to say gain a little confidence and criticize everything you read for leaving something (inconsequential) out begin doing your own research and realize it's not so easy write a dissertation about a very small, very...
Monday morning linkage
The shutdown continues to dominate the day's news.Resolution still seems distant. Last week, US Treasury Department Secretary Jack Lew reminded the Senate that extraordinary measures used to cope with our current debt limit run out on Thursday. This weekend, IMF head Christine Lagarde says that a default could tip the world economy into recession. The African Union served up some of the more consequential international news over the past few...
Monday Morning Linkage- it’s all about balance
Women missing...online? The Huffington Post has reported that the gender gap exists online- with 200 million fewer women using the internet than men. Scholars, students, and the general public are set to sit in for a 6-hour editing party at Brown University to try to remedy the gender imbalance on wikipedia (NYT suggests that only 15% of its editors are women). One area where there is a little gender equality? Apparently there is equal gender...
Words of Mass Destruction in the Syria Debate
Note: This is a guest post by Ty Solomon, Lecturer at the University of Glasgow Even though the war in Syria has been raging for the past two years, much of the global outrage that we now see has only erupted with the recent reports about Bashar al Assad’s government attacking civilians with chemical weapons. Arguably, the past two long years of war has not provoked the same level of indignation as we are now seeing from world leaders and...
Cameron’s Respect for the House of Commons’ No Vote on Syria was a Good Day for Democracy
Jump to 1:13: It’s the best question asked during the GOP debates last year Were any other Americans rather awestruck when David Cameron announced himself bound by the the House of Commons’ vote against attacking Syria last month? Wow. I found that so impressive – a due process binding executive war-making. Very nice. I am so used to strutting American presidents insisting that they can use force pretty much as they wish. Somehow the AUMF...
Friday Nerd Blogging: Something From the New TV Season
Yep, it is that time of year as each network rolls out its new programs with the first cancellations already being announced. This year, there is one that is under the radar--a sitcom based on Aliens. Check it out: Ok. Just a youtube bit of genius. Enjoy your weekend.
Friday Morning Linkage
Human Rights Watch has a new report on the killing of 190 civilians in early August by members of five Islamist rebel groups: Ahrar al-Sham, Islamic State of Iraq and Sham, Jabhat al-Nusra, Jaish al-Muhajireen wal-Ansar, Suquor al-Izz Congratulations to Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons on the Nobel Peace Prize. They won't have much time to celebrate given a mid-2014 timeline to destroy all of Syria's chemical weapons...
Why Didn’t the US “Re-interpret” the UN Charter on Syria?
[Note: This is a guest post by Ardeshir Pezeshk, PhD candidate at University of Massachusetts-Amherst, in collaboration with Charli Carpenter.] For a brief moment a few weeks back, law and policy elites in the US gave serious consideration to whether there was a legal basis for a military strike in Syria, either under the auspices of civilian protection or norm protection. White House rhetoric quickly shifted away from humanitarian intervention...