On a plane ride a couple of days ago, I picked up Judith Butler's Frames of War, perhaps a couple of years after I should have. Though there is a lot of the book that I disagreed with, reading it was a transformative experience. It is perhaps particularly relevant to the subject and content of Megan MacKenzie's latest post, given Butler's suggestion that "specific lives cannot be apprehended as injured or lost if they are not first apprehended...
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Gang Rape and “Peaceful Death”
The world has payed attention to the gang-rape of a young woman (her name has not been made widely public) in Delhi and her struggle to survive over the last few weeks. The reports of the brutal incident on December 16th broke through the national news of India and set waves of reports through the rest of the world. The sheer violence, randomness, and horror of it seemed to fixate the globe. Now, as we learn that this woman's struggle to...
Saturday Afternoon Linkage
James Scott Linville passes along Anuradha Roy's comments on the protests engulfing India and the death of the 23-year old victim whose brutal rape galvanized them (via 3QD). Reactions to the Japanese election as covered by the Rising Powers Initiative blog. You know, GWU is much better at Georgetown at establishing a presence for its programs. Just saying. Mark Leon Goldberg on Timor Leste as a "2012 success story" for UN peacekeeping. Nara...
National Security and Civil Liberties meet Securitization and State Formation
Corey Robin's Jacobin essay is getting a lot of attention, including from Jon Western at the Duck and Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns & Money. I don't think that it detracts from Robin's essay to note that the argument he's making is long-standing in international-relations scholarship. It appears in David Campbell's seminal Writing Security and, more recently, in the form of "securitization theory" (PDF), complete with similar invocations...
Friday Afternoon Linkage: Threat Edition
Last week I attended our annual neighborhood holiday party and caught up on all the news about the neighbors' kids. One recently graduated with an advanced degree in computer science and is now an "ethical hacker" working in "the U.S. intelligence community." What exactly is an "ethical hacker"? Another spent the last two years in intensive Chinese language study and has a job "following twitter and websites and stuff...for the U.S....
Planning to be Shocked
One of the most repeated, and most dubious, axioms about strategy is the notion that being proactive is wiser than being reactive, and that reactivity is something we should be allergic to. In the words of Briain's foreign secretary William Hague, 'the nation that is purely reactive in foreign policy is in decline.' Likewise, written into the folklore of the US foreign policy establishment is the notion that the 'strategic shocks' that struck...
Scholar/Policy Gap – Filling Up The Glass
I have read with great interest over the last few days posts by Jeffrey Stacey and now Sean Kay on the gap between scholarship and policy. I agree with much of what they said - seriously - and I want to raise a more positive spin on some of these issues. I the gap between policy and scholarship in Washington DC as *mildly* improving when it comes to political science, at least from the political science side of the question. This is not to say...
Penultimate Call for Award Nominations
The deadline for nominations and voter registration is fast approaching. The list of nominees is unchanged since my last update. You should feel free to add nominations there, to email us, or in he comments section below. Please do check the eligibility criteria. The two most common ineligible nominees are (1) restrictions on Duck of Minerva pieces and permanent contributors and (2) online articles that don't qualify as blogs, such as Foreign...
Sean Kay: “The Scholar/Policy Gap in International Relations Revised”
This is a guest post by Sean Kay. Jeff Stacey’s introductory blog post at the Duck of Minerva gives important perspective showing that scholarly training helped him in government to frame issues and develop policy. Stacey suggests academic perspectives should inform policy and, indirectly, corrects an argument in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Robert Gallucci. Gallucci, who has a distinguished career in government and academe, asked...
The Academic-Policy Nexus: a few more thoughts
Regarding my previous post and the very useful comments, first the matter of what do we do once we realize that a policy problem in search of a policy solution is the equivalent of a social scientific puzzle in search of an explanation, for both the solution and the explanation are outcomes. In other words, Step One is to identify the policy problem in question. Step Two is to search the academic literature for a published study (in book or...
Oh, Shoot! I Forgot Morning Linkage!
I'm now on my sixth day of the sick, so in lieu of a post that requires much thought: Yay for USB-powered microphones and pop filers. The first will make it much easier to record podcasts at conferences. The second will make it much easier to record podcasts. Lyra heartily endorses the following: Nathan Hale's Hazardous Tales: One Dead Spy and The Squire's Tale. Lyra and I are having a great time playing Tales of Monkey Island. A new wireless...
Happy Merry from the Duck of Minerva
Thanks so very much for your continued support, interest, and engagement with the Duck of Minerva. This has been an exciting year for the blog thanks to all of you. At the same time, 2012 has, like every other year, been a difficult 12 months for many. Our hearts go out to all those who have suffered pain and loss. May the close of 2012 treat you well, and 2013 prove a terrific year.