by Jon Western | 20 Apr 2012 |
In an essay in this month's Scientific American, Alice Gast, president of Lehigh University, makes a case for the benefits of international collaboration in the sciences:It has become cliche that great discoveries come from interdisciplinary thinking... [F]ew realize how much science is energized when team members have different cultural approaches to problem solving. International diversity is just as important as diversity of discipline. She...
by Charli Carpenter | 18 Apr 2012 |
I have an essay online this morning at Opinio Juris as part of a symposium they are running this week on social media and international law:One of the most curious aspects of the Kony2012 campaign is its backing by an important and powerful public servant, Luis Moreno-Ocampo. In publicly endorsing the campaign, Moreno-Ocampo, the chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, has espoused a powerful causal hypothesis: that social media...
by Patrick Thaddeus Jackson | 18 Apr 2012 | Featured
The keynote address for this year's NITLE Symposium was delivered by Dan Cohen, a major voice in the "digital humanities" movement and one of the leading figures behind Zotero, the open-source free EndNote killer research tool. Cohen outlined a vision of 'Net-enabled scholarly publishing that I can only think to call the aggregation model: editorial committees scanning the 'Net to find the most interesting scholarly content in a given field or...
by Charli Carpenter | 18 Apr 2012 |
In commemoration of the Titanic disaster, researchers at Uppsala University have released a report analyzing the evolution and impact of the "women and children first" rule guiding evacuations from sinking ships. They examined 18 historical cases of peace-time maritime disasters involving passenger ships and concluded:Women have a distinct survival disadvantage compared to men. Captains and crew survive at a significantly higher rate than...
by PM | 17 Apr 2012 | Featured
This is a shameless bleg to two different audiences.The first, and immediately more important, is undergraduate students who might like to take a serious course about international relations, political science, and science fiction this summer. During the first summer term, I'm picking up Dan's section of Government 310: Interstellar Relations.The second, and closely related, audience is the readers of this blog, to whom I turn to help improve...
by Dan Nexon | 17 Apr 2012 |
Hmm.Authorities in Denmark have charged a university professor with assisting “foreign intelligence operatives”, believed to be Russian. Professor Timo Kivimäki, a conflict resolution expert, who teaches international politics at the University of Copenhagen, is accused of “providing or attempting to provide” information to four Russian government officials on several documented instances between 2005 and 2010. The indictment claims Kivimäki,...
by Robert Kelly | 16 Apr 2012 | Featured
Jennifer Lind has a good piece up on Foreign Affairs this week on why NK seems to regularly get away with with hijinks like last week’s rocket test (which directly contravenes UN Resolution 1874). She notes, correctly, that NK has been pulling unanswered, wild stunts like this for years – shootouts in the Yellow Sea, nuclear tests, kidnappings, etc. Further, the US particularly tends to hit back when hit. Indeed, looking at the GWoT, America’s...
by Charli Carpenter | 16 Apr 2012 |
My "Human Security" doctoral students just finished reading Kathryn Sikkink's new book on international tribunals and it is undisputably their favorite of all those assigned this year. Partly that is because it is written in clear, non-academic prose. Partly it's the common-sense way in which Sikkink describes her methods and findings, and she ties her story concretely to ongoing policy debates. Partly it's the way she weaves a portrait of her...
by Dan Nexon | 15 Apr 2012 |
[warning: this post and the piece attached to is is only of interest to a handful of academics]The April 2011 issue of International Organization included a very interesting review essay by Orfeo Fioretos entitled "Historical Institutionalism in International Relations." The thrust of Fioretos' argument, developed through a discussion of books ranging from John Ikenberry's After Victory to Abe Newman's Protectors of Privacy, is that...
by Charli Carpenter | 13 Apr 2012 |
Some of those who missed the ISA panel on popular culture have asked me if I can send them my remarks. So I decided to upload them in video format as well. You can see my presentation on Battlestar Galactica and civil-military relations below. This is essentially a presentation of a research paper I did with two students, which will be published later this year in Nicholas Kiersey and Iver Neumann's Battlestar Galactica and International...
by Dan Nexon | 13 Apr 2012 | Featured
Kindred Winecoff has a pretty sweet rebuttal to my ill-tempered rant of late March. A lot of it makes sense, and I appreciate reading graduate student's perspective on things. Some of his post amounts to a reiteration of my points: (over)professionalization is a rational response to market pressure, learning advanced methods that use lots of mathematical symbols is a good thing, and so forth. On the one hand, I hope that one day Kindred will...
by Charli Carpenter | 12 Apr 2012 |
Guest Post by Deborah AvantAnyone remember that 1980s Terry Gilliam film Brazil - a futuristic dystopia where overreliance on bizarre and mostly broken machines led to equally bizarre social maladies? Well, I’m having a Brazil moment. According to Google Scholar, I am no longer the author of my 2005 book. If you search my name, it has disappeared. If you search the title a (very well done) review article comes up but no book. The book – and my...