I was transfixed this week by the week's events in Kenya, the attacks by Al-Shabaab on the Westgate shopping center that resulted in the deaths of at least 60 people. With friends just a stone's throw away from that mall, it was hard to turn away from that unfolding set of events. So, this week, to give you some context, I've linked a number of stories that try to explain how the attack could have happened, why al-Shabaab appears intent on this...
Perhaps the first Monkey Cage post at the Washington Post presents some numbers that show that policy-makers tend not to like the higher tech kind of poli sci (or theory) We knew this from previous TRIP reports and other studies, but still it is important to consider such stuff, especially given that quantitative work (in IR, anyway) is now about as prevalent as non-quant work. One might be tempted to argue that we should stop or reduce quant...
Michael Desch and Daniel Philpott at Notre Dame have concluded their two-year Mellon funded working group on religion and IR and published their final report titled Religion and International Relations: A Primer for Research. Desch, in his introduction (titled: "The Coming Reformation of Religion in International Affairs? The Demise of the Secularization Thesis and the Rise of New Thinking About Religion"), starts with a puzzle expressed by...
Action on Armed Violence is circulating some terrific info-graphs and advocacy videos documenting civilian harms from various conventional weapons in Syria: By even the most cautious estimates, explosive weapons have killed and injured tens of thousands of people in Syria. They are thought to be responsible for about 40% of deaths in the conflict. Crucially, civilians are overwhelmingly the victims of this group of deadly weapons, which...
Grand Strategy is an arcane and misapplied concept. Developing a Grand Strategy to deal with China that focuses on cyber capabilities is a dangerous move that will have large repercussions for the international system. The National Interest recently hosted a debate about the merits of the Air Sea Battle strategy versus the Offshore Control strategy. Here, I focus on the newly developed Air Sea Battle strategy since it is likely the more...
The international news continues to be dominated by Saturday's terrorist attack at Westgate Mall in Nairobi, Kenya. The coverage of the attacks in most major newspapers has been excellent (and peppered with first-person reflections) due to the large number of reporters and photojournalists who are based in Nairobi. Somali Islamist group Al-Shabaab claimed responsibility via Twitter, and Twitter struggled to deactivate its feeds. The immediate...
In my email inbox last week was a notification of a fellowship opportunity. Since I have a sabbatical coming up shortly—okay, in a couple of years, but time flies, right?—I eagerly skimmed the details. It’s a fellowship squarely in my field. The funding is pretty generous, probably enough to help me buy out some extra time at my institution, and finish the damn book that is core to my next promotion. But at the end of the description, there...
Breaking Bad is down to two episodes left. Just like a great book, you want to desperately get to the end until you realize that the end means the end of a great story-telling experience. So, here is one set of folks pondering the end with heaps of spoilers.
It seems altogether appropriate to me that my last Duck post should be a post about pedagogy. The more years I spend in this business, the more convinced I am that our area of greatest impact, and the place where our academic vocations are most clearly on display, is the classroom. Whether in-person or virtual, hi-tech or low-tech, as a permanent member of a faculty or as a visitor coming in to guest-teach or participate in a single class...
The Assad regime says the Syrian conflict is at a stalemate. Meanwhile a cease-fire between Free Syrian Army and Islamic State in Iraq and Syria forces in Azaz. Roy Gutman from McClatchy reports on some of the dynamics between FSA and radical Islamists. Battling it out in public -- McCain in Pravda responding to Putin; Rouhani in yesterday's Washington Post; Assad on Fox. New pressure to bring Israel into the Chemical Weapons Convention?...
Casual observation suggests that the two most common answers to the question above are: 1) there's a very good chance that they'd start a nuclear war with Israel; and 2) there's no real reason to think any other state would be impacted in any significant way. I find both unpersuasive for reasons I'll discuss below. Before I do, though, let me get something out of the way---in this post, I will argue neither for nor against the use of force to...
The first video ever played on MTV, back when MTV played music videos most of the time, was the one-hit wonder "Video Killed the Radio Star" by The Buggles. A lament about how new technology ended the career of a singer who was well-adapted to the production standards and genre constraints of an earlier era, the song recounts an irreversible process: In my mind and in my car We can't rewind we've gone too far Pictures came and broke your heart...