So, in the interests of shameless self-promotion, I just wanted to mention that if you are attending APSA and stop by the Cambridge U Press booth, there should be copies of my new book with Ethan Kapstein entitled AIDS Drugs for All: Social Movements and Market Transformations. Pick up a copy, or order a hard or softback version here for a 20% discount (an e-version should be out soon). Below the fold, I'll describe the book and unpack the...
In the New York Times yesterday, Northwestern University political scientist Ian Hurd lays down the law on Syria and intervention: As a legal matter, the Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons does not automatically justify armed intervention by the United States... Syria is a party to neither the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972 nor the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993... Syria is a party to the Geneva Protocol, a 1925 treaty that...
I guess most folks are on the way to APSA. Have fun in Chicago if you're going--and if you're a member of the APSA council, please consider moving the convention to some weekend besides the first week of school. (Also, #SeattleEveryYear. Just saying! Especially if it's going to be in August.) Here's some links: Dani Nedal is also skeptical of Syria. Also BLTN: great post from Kristen Coopie Allen on how where you raise funds influences election...
As a callow undergraduate, I kind of supported the Iraq War for all of the normal reasons; see The Republic of Fear and The Threatening Storm. (I say "kind of" because I was in college and, frankly, tuned out in favor of studying.) A little while ago, it struck me in one of those blinding moments of self-awareness that not only had I been wrong but that Get Your War On (probably NSFW, but basically R-rated) was more accurate than my...
It now looks almost certain that we will see a US military strike of some sort in Syria. There is a lot of angst out there about such a strike -- what are its goals? What will it accomplish? and, Where will it all end? Many are asking "what the hell is the Obama administration thinking?" Many have already concluded that it will be a disaster. This is a fair set of questions in the wake of Iraq and Afghanistan. Erica Chenoweth is running a...
This is a guest post by Sara McLaughlin Mitchell, Professor and Department Chair of Political Science at the University of Iowa. In my previous post, I discussed some problems women face when networking in political science. Here I focus on the progress we have made. As a quantitative conflict scholar, I spend a great deal of time networking in several male-dominated research communities, including the Peace Science Society, the ISA SSIP...
Justice in Syria? The Maritime Labor Convention and the United States. This really isn't a matter of the United States, per se, but the unrelenting hostility of the bulk of the Senate GOP caucus to multilateral treaties. Kupchan and Trubowitz remain, unfortunately, vindicated. Frank Beer discusses the past and present of NATO at e-International Relations. Peter Gleick argues that we are hitting "peak water" in the American West. An...
The US and UK are apparently preparing for air strikes against the Syrian Assad regime, claiming there is little doubt that it is responsible for horrific chemical weapons attacks. Syria has allegedly crossed President Obama's 'red line.' Britain's Foreign Secretary William Hague claims that "We can not in the twenty first century allow the idea that chemical weapons can be used with impunity, that people can be killed in this way and that...
Daniel Drezner writes that Meghan McCain's proposition that attention paid to Miley Cyrus can crowd out attention paid to Syria is bunk. With all due regard to Drezner, let me debunk the bunk claim---or, at least, show that the "Twerking Kills" hypothesis is plausible: This paper studies the influence of mass media on U. S. government response to approximately 5,000 natural disasters occurring between 1968 and 2002. These disasters took nearly...
Sent by a friend, who would rather we blog more on Syria. Or WMD. Or development. Or disease. Or, well, just about anything but.....
Happy first day of Fall classes, at least at my university. A question for discussion: Is there any value whatsoever to a live lecture delivered in front of large numbers of students, given that podcasting is now sufficiently easy and ubiquitous that anyone with a laptop or a smartphone (or a digital voice recorder or camcorder) or access to those devices via a campus IT services department can do it? I would appreciate it if we could have this...
In my grad class every semester, I always ask the students if IR is really the best field for studying human security. Undoubtedly, I get some students who respond that political science is the best discipline and IR is the best field – or even the only field – to really study human security. However, I usually also get a large minority of the students who acknowledge off the bat that most of the phenomena we study could be similarly examined...