[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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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.
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...
[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...
The U.S. had two dramatic efforts to capture high priority terrorist targets, one in Libya and another in Somalia. The snatch and grab operation in Libya was a seeming success (though I'm wondering if last night's kidnapping of the Libyan Prime Minister was retaliation). The Somalia mission, coming one day after the 20th anniversary of the Black Hawk Down episode, was aborted when the team recognized that there was no way they could take their...
Members of international institutions typically honor their commitments. But that does not, by itself, tell us much. States are unlikely to join institutions that require them to do things they have no intention of doing. Indeed, some argue that institutions merely act to screen out those least likely to comply. Others, however, have argued that institutions do in fact constrain states - that they are not mere epiphenomena. One prominent...