by PM | 27 Aug 2013 | Featured
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...
by Jon Western | 27 Aug 2013 | Featured
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...
by Dan Nexon | 27 Aug 2013 | Featured
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...
by Dan Nexon | 27 Aug 2013 | Featured
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...
by Patrick Porter | 27 Aug 2013 | Featured
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...
by PM | 27 Aug 2013 | Featured
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...
by Dan Nexon | 26 Aug 2013 | Featured
Sent by a friend, who would rather we blog more on Syria. Or WMD. Or development. Or disease. Or, well, just about anything but.....
by Patrick Thaddeus Jackson | 26 Aug 2013 | Featured
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...
by Amanda Murdie | 26 Aug 2013 | Featured
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...
by Jon Western | 26 Aug 2013 | Featured
Steve Walt asked a great question the other day: Are U.S. Interests Really at Stake in Egypt, Syria, etc...? In posing the question, he cited a recent comment from Brendan Green, a visiting professor at the LBJ School at the University of Texas-Austin: "Pre-2011, if you said that Mubarak would fall, that Egypt would experience a mass political mobilization that destroyed its political order several times over, that the streets of Cairo would...
by Dan Nexon | 26 Aug 2013 | Featured
Paul Krugman has an op-ed in today's New York Times in which he likens the rise and decline of technology companies to Ibn Khaldun's account of the rise and decline of dynasties: success breeds complacency and soon the barbarians are running the show. This happened, he argues, to Microsoft, which once upon a time dominated the computer industry thanks to network externalities: The odd thing was that nobody seemed to like Microsoft’s products....
by Adrienne LeBas | 26 Aug 2013 | Featured
Syria agrees to allow a UN team of experts access to the site of last week's alleged chemical weapons attacks. US government officials says it's too little, too late. The Tunisian opposition is back in the streets and is again calling for the government’s resignation. FP’s James Traub remains optimistic. Saturday was the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington. The Atlantic examines why it’s so hard to find a copy of MLK’s “I Have a...