Today is World AIDS Day, an annual opportunity to take stock of the state of the epidemic. Despite a decade of incredible mobilization of finance for and visibility of the AIDS pandemic, UNAIDS estimated that the number of new infections last year 2.5 million still far outstripped the 1.4 million people who received treatment for the first time. There has been some good news. 8 million of the 15 million people thought sick enough to need...
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Saturday Morning Linkage
A weak "contrarian" post from Daveed Gartenstein-Ross on Tom Rick's appearance on Fox News. Watch Daveed flail further in comments. Defence Talk: Pakistan test fires a nuclear-capable ballistic missile and hackers target IAEA. More on the latter from Jeffrey Lewis. Vitalist metaphors for the PhD thesis. Terranova: two posts -- on virtual currencies (and the 'real world') and virtual economies. Misadventures in guest blogging at OrgTheory....
Africa for Norway
This video from Africa for Norway provides a humorous way to think about foreign aid: I suppose there is a good chance readers have already seen the video -- more than 1.5 million people have viewed it on youtube.
Podcast No. 14 – Interview with Michael J. Tierney
The fourteenth Duck of Minerva podcast features Michael J. Tierney.
Friday Morning Linkage
Jeffrey Lewis analyzes evidence that Burma seeks nuclear weapons. Juan Cole discusses shifting positions on the status of Palestine at the UN. And some good pre-vote analysis from Erik Voeten. More on PTSD and drone pilots. Brendan Keefe highlights advances in artificial intelligence. The aforementioned Foust-Drezner exchange on policy-oriented political-science PhDs. And also: The growing space-junk threat impacts military...
The Susan Rice Fiasco
I'm not sure the Obama administration could have handled this any worse. We live in a highly politicized world and somehow the Obama administration is "shocked, shocked" that this issue is being hyped. And while I'm sympathetic to the flurry of criticisms of FoxNews and others for hyping this, I'm also struck by how badly the administration has handled it all. The core of Obama's foreign policy has been to lighten America's global military...
The International Relations Discipline and the Rise of Asia
A few months ago, I was commissioned by the International Relations and Security Network of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology to provide a brief write-up on how Asia’s rise will impact the formal discipline of international relations (IR) within political science. I didn’t get a chance to put it up earlier, and inevitably, the brief means sweeping judgments in just a few pages, but I think it’s a reasonable effort. Here is the version...
Of Sultans and Soap Operas
This is a guest post by Peter S. Henne. Peter is a doctoral candidate at Georgetown University. He formerly worked as a national security consultant. His research focuses on terrorism and religious conflict; he has also written on the role of faith in US foreign policy. During 2012-2013 he will be a fellow at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia. Last December, I was in Doha to attend the UN's Alliance of Civilizations conference....
Wednesday Night Linkage
Spent the morning recording a podcast. Except that we just chatted and never got around to the actual interview. Then it was off to job talks and child chauffeuring.... Tom Z. Collina doesn't like the idea of a BMD system for the US east coast. Dan Drezner says that China is involved in a security dilemma with ASEAN. I'm not so sure: it looks to me like Beijing is being expansionist and that's provoking its neighbors. Noorjahan Akbar reports...
A Semi-Canadian Perspective on the Academic-Policy Divide Debate
The semi-annual policy/academic divide debate is back thanks to discussions about PhDs for the policy world (Drezner v. Foust) and Galluci's piece on the debate, with Drezner's response. I would guess that this event is tied to a lunar calendar as it seems to occur often but not always just after Thanksgiving. Anyhow, I posted my views on this at Canadian International Council--the folks seeking to be the Great White North version of Foreign...
“Dangerous Neighborhood:” Operation ‘Defensive Pillar’ and its Interpreters
This is a guest post by Daniel J. Levine (University of Alabama) and Daniel Bertrand Monk (Colgate University). Daniel J. Levine is author of Recovering International Relations: The Promise of Sustainable Critique. Daniel Bertrand Monk is the co-editor, with Jacob Mundy, of the forthcoming: The Post-Conflict Environment: Intervention and Critique (University of Michigan, 2013). The authors’ names for this essay have been listed...
Parsing the DOD’s Directive on Autonomous Weapons
Yes. Only two days after Human Rights Watch launched its "preemptive call" to ban the development and deployment of such systems, the US Defense Department doubled down with a document (shorter version here) that claims: "Autonomous and semi-autonomous weapons systems shall be designed to allow commanders and operators to exercise appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force." Comforting? On the surface this sounds like a nod to...