One of the great things about being done with my book project is that I can begin blogging and writing a little more openly regarding the issues I've been tracking empirically over the past seven years, in the same way I have often weighed in publicly on political subjects I'm not studying directly. The latter type of activity is referred to by Patrick Jackson and Stuart Kaufman as "Weberian activism": informing policy debates by educating...
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Common Errors in Essay Writing, as Demonstrated by Film Critics, Part 1
Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post settled on a theme for her extremely negative review of the new "The Lone Ranger" flick. Indeed, one might argue that developing a unifying thread is an important part of short-form writing. It holds everything together and provides the reader with a single, if stylized, takeaway. He basic theme? That The Lone Ranger tries to combine too many different themes, tones, and film elements. It suffers from such a...
Obama’s ‘Strategic Patience’ on North Korea is more Responsible than yet another Impossible ‘Vision’ to Solve NK
Newsweek Korea asked me to participate in a debate on Obama’s strategic patience. A friend of mine wrote against it; I wrote in defense. Here is the Korean language text at the NWK website. Below is my original English language version. In brief I argue that North Korea is so hard to pin down, that big strategies never work with it, provoke it into lashing out, and raise impossible expectations on democratic decision-makers. So Obama is acting...
Tiwesdæg: the Left-hand of Linkage
A new military study concludes that drone strikes are more deadly to civilians than those conducted by manned fighter craft. Keep in mind, however, that fighter pilots are the traditional elite in the USAF and the rise of drones and drone pilots has generated a lot of internal politics. More important: there's no indication that the study controlled for the kinds of missions being carried out by drones and by strike aircraft. Speaking of...
The Snowden Affair and International Hierarchy
Most of my public comments on Snowden have focused on how to evaluate his actions as a US citizen and someone entrusted with a high-level security clearance. Here I want to focus on an analytical concern--that of international hierarchy. I don't have a strong sense of the degree that other scholars associate me with the "new hierarchy studies," but a major theme of my work is that we are better off understanding crticial aspects of...
From Snowden Crash to Anathem
Germany benefits from US signal intelligence. When we consider the widespread industrial espionage carried out by the Chinese, it is helpful to remember France's extensive track record of stealing secrets from its friends and neighbors.* Israel is a major espionage threat to the United States. The British collect a lot of intelligence on allies and adversaries, even if deploying fake rocks in Russia might not have been the best idea in the...
A Network Explanation for the Rise of Global Social Issues
I am delighted to report that as of last Friday at 7:02pm I have completed final revisions on my latest book manuscript. This culminates a project on issue neglect that started with my observations about children born of war, emerged as a theory of "agenda-vetting," and involved a detailed NSF-funded study of the rise and fall of issues in the human security network. It also includes detailed case studies on several norm-building campaigns I've...
Monday Morning Linkage
Hi Duck friends. Here are some links to start your week... Liao Yiwu served four years in prison for reciting his poem "Massacre" in memory of the 1989 Tienanmen Square protests. His horrifying prison memoir reminds us that "China remains a prison of the mind: prosperity without liberty." More importantly, the memoir show the ways in which the Leninist-capitalist Chinese system of government and economy is replicated inside the prison. The...
The Society of Individuals
Although I have made many of the points I am about to make in comments posted on Phil's and Eric's posts about rational choice theory over the past week, what I want to do at this point is to pull the whole thing together and make clear just why I still maintain that rational choice theory -- and indeed, the broader decision-theoretical world of which rational choice theory constitutes just a particular, heavily-mathematized province --...
Sunnanæfen Linkage
Robert Lieber takes another swing at the declinism debate. Kyrgyzstan moves forward on evicting the US from Manas. US suspends Bangladesh's trade privileges. China shifts policy on the Dali Lama. Also commits combat troops to Mali. David Schorr on nuclear zero. And also: Kindred W. takes on Dan Drezner's critique of the foreign-policy commentariat. In case you missed it, the next stop for the giant yellow Duck is... Pittsburgh....
Graduate School After Peace Corps
In 1998, while I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador, I decided to apply for a PhD program in political science. I had no idea what I was doing. Though I had majored in political science at UNC-Chapel Hill, graduating in 1993, I had a limited understanding of the "discipline." I barely knew what journals were. I had limited access to information about programs, with no access to the internet on a regular basis (I had a dial-up connection...
Friday Nerd Linkage
What can I say? It was a good week in the US for gender minorities. (On the other hand, this new list of "most influential people in armed violence reduction" includes only 25 women.) In other lighthearted nerd fare, this inspired the scientist in me who must complete the method(ologie)s appendix for my new book on human security issues by 5pm or (spontaneously com)bust. About that: here is a neglected human security threat I did not think to...