by Charli Carpenter | 12 Sep 2012 | Featured
A heavily attended side-event today was the Norwegian Red Cross' panel discussion "Looking Back to Look Forward: The Cluster Munitions Convention and What it Means for Limiting the Impact of Other Weapons Systems."Richard Moyes, coordinator of the International Network Against Explosive Weapons, presented a compelling address about the importance of regulating the use of explosives in populated areas, and putting the burden of proof on states...
by Josh Busby | 12 Sep 2012 | Featured
U.S. Consulate in Benghazi 9/12/2012I heard Dan Drezner in the car on NPR yesterday talking about whether foreign policy might matter in this election. And, last night and today, with the events in Egypt and Libya, he may be more right than even he anticipated.We may have an incident, in the wake of the 11th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks, that will shape the contours of the election and have wider repercussions for U.S. foreign policy in the...
by Dan Nexon | 12 Sep 2012 | Featured
One of my daughter's favorite videos. I love that this song has evolved into a theme for general tolerance and... respect.
by Dan Nexon | 12 Sep 2012 | Featured
Note: this started out as "Morning Linkage" but quickly became an extended comment. I apologize for the poor proofing.Four Americans, including US ambassador Christopher Stevens, were killed in the extremist Islamist attack on the American consulate in Libya, Hayes Brown has a good, quick, overview of the circumstances surrounding the attacks in Libya and Egypt. As he concludes: Finally, the relationship between the United States and the...
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...