Mornin' ducks... In anticipation of the P5+1 talks in Kazakhstan this week, let's start the week in... Iran Yousaf Butt, a nuclear physicist, urges the West to make Iran a serious offer. But Patrick Clawson argues that the Islamic Republic is just too dysfunctional to cut a nuclear deal. Farhang Jahanpour at Juan Cole's Informed Comment blog argues that talks with Iran might just work this time. Whose argument should we believe? In other...
Displaying Results for ""
Can IR Theory Free this Student?
Omid Kokabee is a University of Texas PhD student from the Department of Physics who was arrested in 2011 when he returned home to Iran over the winter break to visit his family. Though he is by all accounts apolitical, Omid was sentenced to 10 years for conspiring with foreign governments and given additional time in jail after he earned some money teaching other prisoners foreign languages and physics. His fellow students in the UT Physics...
On the Word ‘Global’
The word 'global' has become so frequently used in Western strategic debate that is has almost become background music. On one level, overuse robs it of resonance. But on another, it might be contributing to the conceptual and rhetorical overstretch that has led the US to overextend itself. Consider just one recent example. In making the case recently for maintaining the Pax Americana, the expansive grand strategy in which the US tries to hold...
Torture as War Victory: My Hugely Unpopular Thesis about the ‘Real’ Agenda of Zero Dark Thirty
"This is what winning looks like" I have to confess, I was late to watch "Zero Dark Thirty" (ODT). I read a handful of reviews and blogs about the movie, had arguments with friends about its message, and even wrote it off completely--all weeks before I bothered to watch it. I wasn't interested in watching another American war movie, nor was I keen to see the lengthy torture scenes I had read about in the reviews. I figured I already knew...
Academic Freedom and the Challenges of Going Global: LSE Cancels Conference in UAE.
Apparently, the Arab Spring will not come to the UAE this weekend. Planners of an LSE conference on the implications of the Arab Spring set for this weekend in UAE have cancelled the event after efforts by senior UAE officials to control the content. From the BBC: A senior LSE academic told the BBC he had been detained at the airport in Dubai on Friday. Dr Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, who is the co-director of the Kuwait programme at LSE, said...
Note to Bahrain: Release Prisoners and Provide More Social Services
Thanks to a very awesome grad student of mine, I just realized that last week marked the second anniversary of the start of the Bahrain uprising. Fueled by protests in Tunisia and Egypt, citizens of this small and very beautiful island state took to the streets to demand political changes. For two years, the protests have not completely dissipated but haven’t escalated to the point of civil war either. What explains this continued state of...
Friday Morning Linkage
Here's the round-up: The United Nations refuses to pay compensation to victims of the cholera it brought to Haiti. Not really a surprise. Read Jonathon Katz's The Big Truck That Went By. Joshua Landis' survey of the debate over counting casualties in Syria. There is a strong sense that the numbers are under-reported. Megan Price and her team at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group are still analyzing the numbers presented in their...
“It is the Grating Habit of Partisans on the Winning Side to Tell the Losers How They Might Have Done Better”
And thus Bret Stephens lambasts Democrats for daring to tell the GOP to moderate its foreign policy. Stephens' recipe for "Getting the GOP's Groove Back"? Obama foreign policy, but with an assist from the Resolve Fairy on Iran. I'm not kidding. If you have a Foreign Affairs subscription, you can check it out for yourself. The sad thing is that once you wade through Stephens' boilerplate invocation of supply-side economics (it works! Kennedy cut...
The New Grand-Strategic Divide? A Response to Thomas Wright
We should stop using the term “isolationism” to describe policies tht entail a more restrained U.S. role in the world.
Legal Prostitution: what can we learn from the empirical record?
No, this isn't one of those posts where we go all "Monkey Cage" on our readers and pimp (sorry) promote political-science research, but rather a "Dan is befuddled, perhaps readers might help" kind of thing. In other words, I make no effort to answer the question of the title. The post is an extended version of the question itself. In one of those strange synergies associated with social media, I've seen a fair number of things about...
Update: UWE Response to My Letter
I have an update for those interested in the decision by the University of the West of England to shutter its Politics and IR programs. Last night, I sent the following message to UWE Vice Chancellor Steven West: 19 February 2013 Dear Vice Chancellor West, I learned today that the University of the West of England is seriously considering a decision to close its Politics and International Relations programs. I believe that would be a serious...
2013 Awards Update
I apologize for my radio silence on the OIAS awards since we announced the finalists. The winners are being selected by a panel of judges for each award. Each panel is composed of staff from the Duck of Minerva and "outside experts." The latter have PhDs in political science and are "blog savvy," meaning that they either maintain blogs and/or are long-term consumers of academic blogs. Each judge is providing a "top two" ranking directly to me....