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...
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Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Methodological Tools: Social-Network Analysis Alert
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,...
The Triumph of Liberal Internationalism?
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...
Saturday Afternoon Video
Saturday Morning Linkage
Hayes Brown discusses the Armenia-Azerbaijan state of play.Robert's been giving you the ground-level view of Pyongyang. Here's the satellite-eye view (via Kelsey Atherton).Henry Farrell on the European Central Bank's new program. How much is the economy, let alone the long-term unemployed, being hurt by the Republican-forced expiration of unemployment benefits? And why aren't we talking about it? At Howl at Pluto: an interesting debate among...
Truth and Reconciliation Commissions Don’t Achieve Truth or Reconciliation: Discuss
In a recent article by Michal Ben-Josef Hirsch, Mohamed Sesay and myself, we explore broad-based claimed that transitional justice mechanisms are a necessary ingredient in successful peace processes. More specifically, we question the increasingly universal and rarely challenged assumption that truth and reconciliation commissions (TRCs) establish the truth and reconciliation necessary for lasting peace (the TRCs= truth and reconciliation...
Landmine Advocacy From The Digital Archive
I am preparing to leave for a week to conduct participant-observation research at the The Third Meeting of States Parties (3MSP) to the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) in Oslo. As I prepare my remarks for the Youth Meeting, which I understand is supposed to be one of my more inspirational talks, I've been looking up old advocacy videos on YouTube and I came across this 2006 landmine campaign ad which I'd never seen before. It was...
Romney’s Poland Obsession
Associated PressAlthough he doesn't get the European Phased Adapted Approach (EPAA) quite right, Mark Adomanis at Forbes makes the right point about the BMD portion of the Romney foreign-policy memo:I don’t think I’m being uncharitable, but if you read this paragraph and didn’t have any background knowledge about US missile defense in Eastern Europe you would come away with at least two very clear conclusions 1) Obama canceled a missile defense...
Podcast No. 7 – Interview with Alex Cooley
2012 interview with Alexander Cooley, focused on Central Asian politics.
Minimalist Friday Nerd Blogging
Nope, nothing here. Why? Google and its doodle. We need to say no more but to make sure you press on the various characters and realize that you need to go out and read Redshirts by John Scalzi.
A Short Note on Editorial Policies at the Duck of Minerva
There's been a lot of on-blog and off-blog chatter about reactions to Brian's most recent issue of The Canard, which some (though certainly not all) readers found offensive for its satirical use of stereotypes about the Democratic Republic of Congo. Brian wrote a rebuttal to his critics, which also triggered a negative reaction among segments of our readership. Other commenters weighed in to question whether posts in the style of The Onion...
Friday Morning Linkage
The Romney foreign-policy memorandum is, for lack of a better term, a bad joke. One example: It twice suggests that the Obama Administration has backed away from European missile defense, in part by using weasel language on the third-site system ("Abandoning A European Missile Defense System"). The memorandum's claims about Iran are inadvertently answered in this short Stephen Metz piece on the vacuousness of current "attack Iran"...