Arriving in the middle of the International Studies Association annual meeting, here is your Thursday morning linkage... Man tries to smuggle 10% of endangered Madagascan tortoise population into Thailand DRC military facilitating poaching and pillaging in UNESCO world heritage site Just when the French thought it was safe to go home: suicide bombers in Timbuktu Bad Chinese air killing 1.2 million Chinese every year prematurely Chinese...
Posting will be light.
The following is a guest post by Peter Henne. -- Once again, the International Studies Association annual meeting is upon us, followed by the Midwest Political Science Association conference. It's a good bet that most readers of the Duck will be attending one or both of these, or other upcoming meetings. One of the best parts of academic conferences is the Q-and-A portion of panels, when scholars get to respond to critiques and comments on...
Good Morning Duckies... Happy April Fool's Day. Here are some stories which we didn't make up just for this day...: Nicholas Sarkozy will soon be an employee of Qatar. The four year long battle for the Euro is not over. The top US adviser in Afghanistan is a former kebab restaurant owner from Nebraska. The $37 billion Little Crappy Ship (a.k.a. "The Klingon Bird of Prey") is not survivable in combat. The Indian Air Force loses one fighter...
The Canard "All the fake news that's fit to print" The long awaited return of HBO’s wildly popular fantasy series, the Game of Thrones, has not generated enthusiasm on the part of at least one group. The nation’s international relations reference librarians, those who help students and members of the public research the complicated dynamics of world politics, are sighing collectively as they anticipate the coming months of boredom. During the...
Bear with me, because this post has a long backstory. As many of you know, I'm a former policy debater. Indeed, so are a number of guest and permanent bloggers at the Duck of Minerva. And not a few other international-relations scholars. Well, this weekend is the National Debate Tournament (NDT), which is like the NCAA basketball tournament for fast-talking nerds, misfits, and future legal power players. In fact, the two aforelinked Ducks are...
Why show a trailer for an Indian zombie movie? Two reasons: it has the word globalization in it; and it helped me make it to the Final Four of Twitter Fight Club 2013. To newbies, the first rule of #TFC13 is to talk about it. So, check out the competition of the international security wonks, and then vote for me on Monday. That way, I can be utterly distracted at the ISA for the finale is Wednesday. Enjoy your weekend.
In a piece that's bound to generate controversy among political scientists, Isaac looks at the "big picture" of the defunding of (many forms of) political science via the Coburn Amendment. What's likely controversial about the piece? First, Isaac argues that the defunding of political science is simply a wedge in the broader conservative "war on science." It seems very clear that the move to defund political science is linked to a broader...
Editor's Note: Back in February I riffed on a post by Erik Voeten in which Erik discussed two articles in International Organization (IO). One, by our colleague Matt Kroenig, argued that nuclear superiority gives states advantages in crisis bargaining (PDF). Another, by Todd Sechser and Matthew Fuhrmann, rejects this claim (PDF). After the two posts sparked some interesting discussion--both on- and offline--I approached all three about doing a...
Herbert Marcuse had some interesting things to say about certain political acronyms. The meaning is fixed, doctored, loaded. Once it has become an official vocable, constantly repeated in general usage, "sanctioned" by the intellectuals, it has lost all cognitive value and serves merely for recognition of an unquestionable fact. This style is of overwhelming concreteness. The "thing identified with its function" is more real than the thing...
Joshua Goldstein and I look at R2P After Syria. But, what will Syria look like after Syria? And, what exactly is the Obama administration doing there? Training and arming the rebels covertly but not with non-lethal military aid -- body armor and night vision. UN arms treaty blocked by Iran, North Korea, and Syria. Go figure. Title is misleading, but this is comprehensive look at Afghanistan -- will likely be at war long after 2014. Current...
I am happy to invite my friend Tom Nichols to guest-post about the continuing Iraq War debate. Tom responded so substantially to my original post series on the war (one, two, three), that I invited him to provide a longer write-up. Tom is a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and an adjunct professor in the Harvard Extension School. His blog can be found here, his twitter here. His opinions of course are his...