Francesco Guicciardini (1483-1540) was an Italian historian and statesman who served in the Florentine and papal diplomatic services and was the author, among other works, of the landmark History of Italy (Storia d’Italia), a foundational work on statecraft and grand strategy which combined careful historical research with general theorizing about the ethics and practices of international behavior. The Francesco Guicciardini Prize is given...
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What We Know, Don’t Know, Can’t Know and Need to Know About the DOD’s Classified Study on Drone Deaths
Just before Independence Day, an analyst for a defense research agency stated in a media interview that a classified DoD study shows that drones are likelier to cause civilian harm than attacks from manned fighters. Lawrence Lewis, a researcher for the Center for Naval Analyses, says these findings resulted from a statistical analysis he conducted using classified data from Afghanistan mid 2010-mid 2011 as part of a project funded by...
Race, Gender and Civic Justice in America
The idea that citizens should be empowered by law to lethally judge who is a criminal threat is dangerous and wrong. Here's one reason why: Just a small-n social experiment? Yes, though here are some stats to demonstrate how this does and is likely to play out in the criminal justice system..
Monday Morning Linkage
Good morning... Jarrod Hayes discusses his new book, Constructing National Security: US Relations with India and China. Mark Safranski (i.e. zen of Zenpundit) points us to Lt. General Prakash Katosh's "Optimising the Potential of Special Forces." [Original Article] Shyam Saran argues that India's new role as an observer on the Arctic Council should be used to restrain the headlong rush into an ecological catastrophe. Steve Aftergood notes that...
13 Cuetzpalin Linkage
The current issue of the International Journal of Comparative Sociology has a special issue on trade and travel. In it, sociologists apply network analysis in domains familiar to international-relations scholars. I haven't read the articles yet, but I thought the cross-disciplinary dimension was interesting enough to ask SAGE to make the contents available. You can download them through July. I'm about halfway through Aliette de...
Friday Morning Linkage
The American retailer response to Bangladesh worker safety -- American firms will monitor and report, but not much else. For those who want to become more socially informed consumers -- missed this last month when Forbes tested the Buycott app. The Oil Drum shuts down: It seems peak oil peaked before oil did. But, did the rise in fracking contribute to its death? Joshua Goldstein looks at the new Uppsala data on Syria and global battle...
Friday Nerd Blegging: Science Fiction and Foreign Policy Discourse
Lawfare T2000 from Adama on Vimeo. The video you see is not just an intriguing and entertaining way to express one position in legal arguments around the debate over autonomous weapons. It represents a fascinating foreign policy artifact, a data point in the policy discourse over the value of a pre-emptive ban on autonomous weapons, one in which science fiction metaphors are given a prime place. This raises intriguing questions about the...
Friday Nerd Blogging Karaoke
As Comic Con approaches and the Course for the Force begins, we, of course, want to sing:
Brief Observations on Kansas City
I spent most of the past week in Kansas City, MO while my daughter competed at the Tumbling and Trampoline National Championships. If you must know, she did fine. I'm most proud of how she handled herself. She was expected to do very well in one of her events, but she made some mistakes and underperformed. She didn't let it get to her, however, and we had a great time. This was the first time I'd set foot in Kansas City. In fact, I've never...
Dear LaTeX: It’s not you, it’s me
Dear LaTeX, You look so pretty. In grad school, all the cool kids were using you. You know, the kids that had backgrounds in differential calculus and ran R even when they didn’t have to? Those kids. I wanted to be like them and have groundbreaking papers. So, instead of working on my arguments and methods, I downloaded you and set out to write my dissertation with your wonderful program. I mean, if the paper looks like it was written by...
Thursday Morning Linkage
“Of course this is risky,” Mr. Logulov said, “but risk is everywhere in life. A brick could fall on your head in the street, for example. And this is just a small risk.” - on the practice of having Russian children take their pictures with circus animals (WTF!?) Here is your morning linkage with a return to form, conservation concerns and pollution in Asia loom large: Worries about China's resumption of the trade in tiger parts Yao Ming urges...
The State of the Killer Robot Debate
In a new piece up at Foreign Affairs on the killer robot debate, I attempt to distinguish between what we know and what we can only speculate about around the ethics / legality of autonomous weapons. The gist: Both camps have more speculation than facts on their side... [But] the bigger problem isn’t that some claims in this debate are open to question on empirical grounds, rather that so many of them simply cannot be evaluated empirically,...