by Charli Carpenter | 11 Sep 2012 | Featured
At multilateral "Meetings of States Parties (MSP)" conferences, delegates are there to review progress made since the establishment of some treaty standard or another - in this case the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CMC) three years ago (3). In the plenaries, therefore, diplomats praise one another's efforts to implement the treaty with fancy prepared speeches, congratulate their hosts for a beautifully organized event, call on...
by Dan Nexon | 11 Sep 2012 | Featured
Image from: https://hub.pastbook.com/en/book/instagram/earth/tag/september11Our memories of "big events" are generally collective in character. Their status as such manifests in a number of ways, but an important one is that their cognitive traces and triggers become intertwined with representations -- images, narratives, and so forth -- found in local and mass culture.This applies to macro-collective events, such as election nights, massacres,...
by Dan Nexon | 11 Sep 2012 | Featured
This is an open thread to discuss what the world of 2012 would look like absent the 9/11 attacks. The counterfactual proposes that they never happened, not that the US government thwarted them. In general, I think the world is a better place. A lot of people who are now dead -- in, for example, New York, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq -- remain alive. A viable peace process might be underway in Israel-Palestine. The US international position...
by Charli Carpenter | 11 Sep 2012 | Featured
Eleven years ago today, the human security threat on many policy-makers' minds was attacks against civilians by transnational terror networks. So it's a good moment to reflect on the state of human security today - both the issue agenda in this network and the global burden of other human security problems, and particularly the gap between the threats people face and the issues that get global policy attention. This week I'm attending the...
by Rodger Payne | 10 Sep 2012 | Featured
This morning, the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville hosted CIA Director David H. Petraeus. The event was not publicized and required a ticket for admission. As chair of the Political Science Department, I was invited to hear the talk -- and had a seat very near the front and center of the stage, less than 25 feet from the speakers. Unfortunately, very few students outside of the (approximately 40) McConnell Scholars were invited...
by Jon Western | 10 Sep 2012 | Featured
Michael Horowitz and Philip Tetlock have an interesting piece in Foreign Policy that examines the record on long-range forecasting of global events -- 15 - 20 years into the future. They acknowledge the inherent difficulties of such a projections, but still wonder:whether there are not ways of doing a better job -- of assigning more explicit, testable, and accurate probabilities to possible futures. Improving batting averages by even small...
by Dan Nexon | 10 Sep 2012 |
These are not ducks.Photo: Dan NexonKelly defeats Khanna. It isn't even close.Michael S. Chase writes about "China’s Search for a 'New Type of Great Power Relationship'" at Jamestown's China Brief.Rob Farley and Michael Cohen hold a "Foreign Entanglements" on the RNC, DNC, and foreign policy in Campaign 2012. I haven't watched it yet, but given the two participants I bet that it is pretty good. Dan Drezner deviates from his standard take on...
by Vikash Yadav | 10 Sep 2012 | Featured
It's time for the annual Asian multilateral alphabet soup round up... Long story short: APEC's proposed Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific (FTAAP), the US backed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and the Chinese backed Tripartite Agreement all appear to have lost some of their thunder to the ASEAN+6's decision to begin negotiating the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) next year.In fact, if the ASEAN+6 negotiations are...
by Robert Kelly | 9 Sep 2012 | Featured
This is my final post about NK; here is one, two, and three. The post title comes from a remark a local guide made to me, and that is the standard KIS image in the pic.7. The Korean People’s Army is pretty much everywhere.This is easily the most militarized state I’ve ever been in. Soldiers and other uniformed military are everywhere, and units of KPA were doing all sorts of even banal things, like going to the Pyongyang fun fair, together en...
by Dan Nexon | 9 Sep 2012 |
Is the society depicted in this film historically accurate? Let's perform a social-network analysis! Here's a helpful hint: the "realism" of social networks in the Iliad, Beowulf, and the Tain tell us squat, zero, nothing, zilch, not a bit about their historicity.From the New York Times (h/t Daniel Solomon): Archaeological evidence suggests that at least some of the societies and events in such stories did exist. But is there other evidence,...
by Dan Nexon | 9 Sep 2012 |
Robert Golan-Viella reflects on a tectonic shift in partisan foreign-policy debate, i.e., the fact that the Democrats have the upper hand. He chalks this up to campaign politics: the key to a Republican victory runs through the economy. I agree that there are "strong critiques" of Obama foreign policy and that "leading Republicans aren't making them." But I don't think this is "politically smart," insofar as leading Republicans are making...
by Dan Nexon | 8 Sep 2012 |