The news out of the Damascus suburbs this morning is highly disturbing and, if the reports are confirmed that this was a chemical attack, no doubt will mark a turning point in the conflict. Dan is somewhat skeptical that it will change the intervention calculus. I disagree. For the better part of the past two years, the Obama administration has pursued to a strategy of conflict management and containment. It doesn't look like that policy has...
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Social Media Before Conference Networking
This is a guest post by Brent Sasley. Sasley is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Texas at Arlington. He blogs at Mideast Matrix and Open Zion. Follow him on Twitter. The political science/IR blogosphere has been engaged in an interesting discussion in recent days: whether and how junior scholars should network at academic conferences (just follow the links from this piece to get them all or scroll...
Will this be the Straw that Break the Back of Non-Intervention in Syria?
There are gruesome reports out of Syria today of a chemical weapons attack in a suburb of Damascus. If they are accurate, the chemical weapons inflicted mass civilian causalities. As David Kenner reports at Foreign Policy: The information coming out of the Ghouta region, where the rebels enjoy significant support, is still unconfirmed by independent observers. But videos allegedly taken Wednesday in the area showed Syrians lying on the...
Wednesday Linkage
While the IR blogosphere navel-gazes, history marches on: Media is reporting a massive civilian casualties from a chemical weapons attack in Syria. The UN is holding an emergency meeting. More from Reuters. Great coverage w/ updates at NuclearDiner. In sharp contrast, an elementary school clerk in Georgia prevented a school massacre by deploying empathy, respectful language and an appeal to a gunman's human dignity. Bradley Manning was...
Brian’s Departure and the Duck
I expect that our readers have seen Brian's public letter of resignation, as well as Charli's personal take on all this and Steve's discussion of the perils and rewards of blogging. This is a choice that Brian made on his own recognizance, one that he announced to the other permanent contributors in an email exchange. Many of the emails that I've received since Thursday have expressed some combination of puzzlement, anger, dismay, and...
Learning the Wrong Lessons? Who Should Blog?
In the past week, there has been a heap of controversy here over a post that many folks found to be offensive. In reaction, the blogger is ceasing to blog, Charli discuss the challenges of blogging, and others still are drawing lessons, such as Christopher Zorn who posted on his FB page "the vast majority of academic political scientists are just not cut out to be bloggers, and probably shouldn't do so." My reaction to this is: blogger is a...
I Wear My Egg In Solidarity: Thoughts on the Perils of Academic Blogging
Sometime in my first year of blogging, I read on the Internets that President Mugabe's troops had burned a six-year-old alive in front of his parents. I was horrified, it was late, I was tired and already pissed off at something completely unrelated, and I foolishly fired off a blog post provocatively entitled "Why Not Assassinate Mugabe?" The point of the post, actually, was that there are a whole bunch of really good reasons why the...
Dear Readers
I have decided, following the controversy surrounding my post on networking, to remove myself as one of the permanent contributors to the Duck of Minerva. Through poorly chosen and ill-considered language and images, I made light of women’s challenges both in their academic and in their daily lives, for which I am deeply sorry. I don’t want to get in the way of other people doing good work on important topics on the site. In the future, I will...
Are you ready for some football?
It's been a big week for football (that is, soccer to all you U.S. readers). The raffle for 2014 World Cup tickets in Brazil started today ($90 is the starting price for first round games). Brazil had a dry run of hosting the Confederations Cup soccer tourney over the summer, which went great, aside from the mass protests by Brazilians upset about corruption and state incompetence that challenged the country's leadership. In other news, the...
Tiwesdæg: the Left-hand of Linkage
A new tumblr: "Everyday Power and Privilege in IR." David Axe lambasts the F-35. Cheryl Rofer recalls her trip to Semipalatinsk. A map of confirmed US-backed coups. Seth Masket holds up the 'tweets predict congressional winners' paper as an example of how scholars should not publicize their research. David Herter announces the completion of volume one of his new trilogy. His first book, Ceres Storm, is the best science-fiction novel that you've...
Are Weapons Inspections about Information or Inconvenience?
Editor's note: this is a guest post by William Spaniel, a doctoral candidate at the University of Rochester. See this previous Duck post describing some of his work, and this post at his own blog providing more information about the research discussed here. Spurred by a new International Organization article by Alexandre Debs and Nuno Monteiro (DM), the Duck of Minerva has recently hosted a debate on the cause of the Iraq War (see here, here,...
Monday Linkage
Rosa Brooks compares our drone wars to Egypt's crackdown. Context by Fred Kaplan on the drone era. Lovely Umayam on the perils of crowdsourcing. Podcast: NPR's Ian Masters and Columbia University's David Philips on the Syrian refugee crisis. Area 51 documents have finally been declassified. The documents suggesting that there was never anything there but a secret spy plane program. What this means for Wendt/Duval's argument I will leave to...