Two of my posts this week (one, two) on hypothetical retrenchment under Ron Paul got a lot of traffic and comments. (H/t to Stephen Walt and Andrew Sullivan.) So here is some follow-up.The OP was intended as an emergency exercise if the US were to face a truly significant crisis that forced retrenchment. The purpose was to ask who are the most important US allies and commitments if we were forced to choose. Right now, the US is not choosing. We...
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Targeting the Source: Why Supporters of Abuse Should Be Held to Account
Guest post by Katherine Boom, University of Massachusetts-Amherst As Bashar al-Assad’s violent crackdown on civilian protesters unfolds, the international community agonizes over how to punish the Syrian government. But while the debate rages over whether to respond to Assad through sanctions, military intervention or a punitive tribunal, few are questioning how to treat his third-party supporters. No case of mass atrocity occurs in a...
Mall Culture in a Global City
Starbucks in the Ibn Battuta MallGreetings Ducklings! Just sending y'all a little post-card from the United Arab Emirates where I am spending a couple of weeks in Dubai and the neighboring emirates trying to learn more about the political economy of this fascinating and dynamic country particularly since the housing bubble burst in 2008.Between meetings I seem to find myself visiting a lot of malls. With the summer time heat, the many malls...
Communities and otherness: a typology
I have long been intrigued by Orson Scott Card's typology of relations to the other, as expressed in his novel Speaker for the Dead. I like it so much that I used it as a central part of my argument (in Chapter 2 of this forthcoming edited volume) that the depicted relations between Colonials and cylons in Battlestar Galactica can tell us something about how to construct a more humane social order. But teaching the novel for the umpteenth time...
Politics on the Water’s Edge: U.S. Elites and Multilateralism
Are there major differences between Democratic and Republican elites on multilateral cooperation? This question animates a new study that I carried out with my frequent collaborator Jon Monten and my colleague William Inboden. In mid 2011 and early 2012, we were able to conduct a unique survey of about 20 Democrats and 20 Republicans, nearly all of whom had served in fairly senior positions in the U.S. government, mostly the Executive...
Say Ron Paul Won…Which US Allies would get Retrenched? (2)
Here is part one where argued that America’s 8 most important allies are, in order: Canada, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, India, Indonesia, Israel, and South Korea. I argued for 3 quick-and-dirty reasons for that ranking, but I got some criticism on these in the first post, so here is some elaboration :1. National Security: Some places, like SA and Mexico, may not appeal much to Americans, but they are so obviously important, that abandonment...
How the US is Slowly Cultivating the Conditions for a Renewed International Order
Professor Anne-Marie Slaughter’s talk in Parliament in London this week offered useful insights into how the Obama administration and foreign policy analysts around it are thinking about shaping international order. As Director of Policy Planning in that administration from 2009-11 she spoke from experience about the mechanisms being used to implement international change. While she touched on Syria, drone strikes and other newsworthy issues,...
Slow-Motion Srebrenica
The NY Times’ recent article on Obama’s “kill list” of American citizens and others suspected--not convicted--of terrorism includes much disturbing information on what our government is doing in our names. The entire “kill list” process and Obama’s central role in it has seldom been presented in such detail in a mainstream publication. It is necessary if ugly reading, even if it is written in something approaching a triumphalist tone. The...
The Mischiefs of Faction
Let's face it: academic American politics blogs get all the love. Not only do they have lots of pretty graphs, but they also make authoritative pronouncements about issues central to the political blogsphere. But that doesn't mean the we forlorn international-relations bloggers won't occasionally welcome our more wealthy cousins to the neighborhood, particularly when the blog in question involves a colleague.So go check The Mischiefs of Faction...
Duck on a TRIP
The new TRIP survey is out. While the overall findings don't hold many surprises, there are some nuggets of interest. We'll have more to say later, but for now I want to call out a particular finding. Every survey asks the question "aside from you, please list four scholars who have produced the most interesting scholarship in the past five years." In some respects, this question functions as a proxy for "most influential," as the list:Is very...
Does the ICC Need to Reconcile with Africa? Bensouda Comes Out Swinging
(Originally posted at Justice in Conflict)Photo: BBCFatou Bensouda, incoming Chief Prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, has put threatening war criminals and defiant states on notice. In several recent public statements she has directly addressed two of the Court's most significant challenges: the accusation that the Court's credibility suffers from a "pro-Western, anti-African" bias and the related issue of ensuring state...
Hanging Out on the Theory-Practice-Policy Divide
In Spring of 2006, I was nearing the end of data collection on my investigation into the human rights of children born of rape and exploitation in conflict zones, and I presented my preliminary findings on the topic atUniversity of Pittsburgh’s Research in International Politics (RIP) monthly brown-bag. In such circles, heavily dominated by empirical approaches, one does not present normative theory (that is, value-laden arguments about how the...