by Dan Nexon | 12 Feb 2012 | Featured
This is the first in what may become an occasional series. Over the last year or two, I've drifted out of regular blogging. The usual excuses apply: too much work and not enough energy. I am so badly behind on a number of book chapters, manuscript revisions, and the like that the simple act of writing this explanation feels like a misuse of my time. Well, anyway, so my notion is this: write short posts designed to provoke discussion of various...
by Brian Rathbun | 10 Feb 2012 |
In a previous post, I puzzled about the popularity of Downton Abbey. It is (was?) a very well-done show, but no different, I thought at the time, than the standard PBS Masterpiece Theater that generally attracts very little viewership. One of the responses was that Downton was a soap opera dressed up as costume drama. I didn’t see it at the time. Downton seemed to hit all the usual British period piece points – the problem of the heir, the...
by Robert Kelly | 10 Feb 2012 | Featured
So I am re-reading Snyder’s Myths of Empire for an R&R. (Btw, not that this is bad book, but is anyone’s reading list in life now primarily driven by anonymous reviewers and the need to get in print for promotion? ) .The book is theoretically complex (almost too many moving parts to my mind), and the cases are an exciting read. But when it was big in the 90s (when I first read it), no one really thought about China as fitting the argument....
by Charli Carpenter | 10 Feb 2012 |
Yes, it's soon to be back. Now if you've read A Clash of Kings, you might rightly wonder who the "priest" is in this allegory, since while Season 2 will feature kings and rich men the only important religious figure is actually a woman. But if you're read A Clash of Kings closely and obsessively you know that the narration by Varys in the trailer is only passingly related to setting up Season 2 itself, and is instead a more generic tale about...
by Rodger Payne | 9 Feb 2012 |
Photo credit: lhgszch on Flickr.Back in December 2009, I wrote a post for the Duck called "Wal-mart Isn't Green." Jared Diamond had written a provocative op-ed about various green business initiatives for the NY Times and Steve Walt had blogged about it too. I recently thought about that exchange because the December issue of The Atlantic included an interesting article by the Asia Society's Orville Schell called "How Walmart Is Changing...
by Patrick Thaddeus Jackson | 9 Feb 2012 | Featured
Social/Science/Fiction preliminary course outlineSIS-419.B01, Summer session 2012Professor Patrick Thaddeus JacksonThis course will meet Mondays and Wednesdays, 1:00pm-4:10pm, from 21 May until 28 June, excluding the Memorial Day holiday on 28 May.Course Objective and DescriptionSocial science has the explanation of society as its explicit goal. Social scientists often try to achieve this goal by studying historical situations in order to...
by Charli Carpenter | 9 Feb 2012 |
It's easy to think of the Security Council as essentially a reflection of great power interests when we see outcomes such as the failure of a resolution calling for President Assad's departure. However I am re-reading Cora True-Frost's article on the other side of the Security Council this week, and thought I'd flag this article as an excellent example of scholarship about the power and politics of such international organizations as norm...
by Cliff Bob | 8 Feb 2012 | Featured
A few years back, when global warming was near the top of the national and global agendas, a surprising new activist suddenly took the field: the Pentagon. In 2009, it called climate change a “threat” to national security. In 2010, it lauded the climate with its ultimate recognition, inclusion in the Quadrennial Defense Review. All of this was uncritically conveyed by journalists on the Pentagon and environmental beats.Recently, the first...
by Charli Carpenter | 8 Feb 2012 | Featured
Guest Post by Joel OestreichA few days ago I met the woman in the attached photograph. Her name is Karima. She is a college graduate who was born a male and, at 21, had gender reassignment surgery. Some time later she entered the “Miss Transgender India” contest and took fifth place. Her boyfriend, out of jealousy, set her on fire (her neck, torso, and upper arms show terrible scars) and broke her leg so badly that she can no longer stand...
by Dan Nexon | 7 Feb 2012 | Featured
Go Luxemburg!According to Michael Beckley, the United States should be deeply concerned about the power-political position of Luxemburg, Denmark, Switzerland, and others. Okay, not really. But that's the implication of Beckley's top-line response to Erik Voeten's dissection of his recent article in International Security.Normally economic growth rates dovetail with changes in wealth gaps. But these measures often diverge when comparing a rich...
by Robert Kelly | 7 Feb 2012 | Featured
:Here is part one, where I argued that international relations as a field has become increasingly uncomfortable with the America’s post-Cold War hegemony and the level of force used in the GWoT, but…2. We’re drifting toward R2PSimultaneously, we are elated that the Libya operation worked, (against all odds given the Iraq experience and what we know about foreign intervention in LDCs generally). Lots of Duck writers supported the intervention....
by Steve Saideman | 7 Feb 2012 | Featured
Lots of folks use war as analogy for football (US version) or football as analogy for war, such as the blitz starting with war going to football and going back to war. How about we take a key concept from football and from other sports and apply it to US (and perhaps NATO) defense policy: the salary cap? In professional sports, leagues have had to impose restraints upon owners of teams since competition among them (combined with nepotism...