I often encourage my students to distill complex analytical concepts into terse, plain English. But some things can't be boiled down to a tweet, as I discovered this week when attempting to explain Cingranelli-Richards data coding in response to Joshua Foust's queries on my abusers' peace post.What I didn't think to tell him in response to his original question was: here is how you can look it up for yourself. So this post contains (I hope) a...
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War Crimes and the Arab Spring. Again.
The direct targeting of actors protected under the laws of war has been one of the most disturbing trends arising out of the Arab Spring. For example, the targeting of medical workers and ambulance drivers was well documented and reported on last year. Additionally, here at the Duck we've been following the issue. In recent months Dan Nexon wrote about the targeting of doctors who treated protesters in Bahrain and I've bloged about the growing...
Abusers’ Peace?
In reaction to Charli's provocative February 20 post on the constructivist peace, I left a number of questions in comments. Since more people read the blog than read the comments, I thought it was worthwhile to put them on the front page as a separate post. Thus, if you are interested, click through. I've added a few pertinent links as well to create added value for people who already read the original comments.I'm not familiar with the...
All Male Soldiers are Rapists and all Female Soldiers are Weak Homewreckers: Fox News on Female Soldiers
I mostly try to let Fox News polemics slide past me like water off a ducks back. It was easy to dismiss Liz Trotta's first rant about the proposed changes to the US military, which will allow more women into front-line positions (and recognize those women who are already in these posts) but the second iteration, in which she clarifies her position (and clearly reads a diatribe from a prompter) demands another interruption to my blogging hiatus....
Vietnam PS Impressions (2): GDR in the Jungle
Here is part one, where I noted how much the communist super-idolization of leaders like Ho and Mao weirds me out. Here are a few more social science impressions from our university trip:4. What is it about communist states and concrete? Ech. It is so ugly and awful-looking. And it looks even worse and more out of place in the tropics. Mozambique and Vietnam look like the GDR in the jungle. The German Democratic Republic was architecturally...
More on Gotovina
Ante GotovinaLast week I wrote about targeting and mentioned the Gotovina Case. This case has become interesting for those interested in international law and post-conflict justice because of the decision of the court (among other things) effectively states that a 4% error rate in targeting in a complex military operation was tantamount to a war crime.As I said in the post, the decision prompted several laws of war scholars (many of whom were...
Tackling the challenges of Big Data
This is what I'm talking about:City University London's Centre for Information Leadership is hosting this free symposium to bring together academics and practitioners from across industry to tackle the challenges posed by "big data" - the growing amount of information that needs to be stored, searched, analysed and visualised in the digital age.The event aims to begin a dialogue across traditionally-siloed sectors, reflecting the fact that a...
The Constructivist Peace: Shared Norms and Pacific Relations Among Human Rights Abusers
Timothy Peterson and Leah Graham recently published a study in the Journal of Conflict Resolution showing that, after you control for the democratic peace, similarities in human rights performance have an important effect on any two countries' likelihood to go to war. The interesting caveat is that this finding holds true for states that abuse their citizens as well as those that don't:Although mutual norms of domestic non-violence are more...
In Defense of Particularism in American Foreign policy
[This is a cross-posting from Dart-Throwing Chimp.] I've just finished reading John Lewis Gaddis's terrific biography of George Frost Kennan, a towering figure in American foreign policy after World War II whom Henry Kissinger described as "one of the most important, complex, moving, challenging and exasperating American public servants." Apart from recommending to the book, which I do without hesitation to anyone with an interest in world...
Labels and tribes
In the Matrix, it's trivial to specify the underlyingdata-generating process. It involves kung fu. Given PTJ's post, I wanted to clarify two points from my original post on Big Data and the ensuing comment thread.I use quantitative methods in my own work. I've invested a lot of time and a lot of money in learning statistics. I like statistics! I think that the development of statistical techniques for specifying and disciplining our analytic...
Experiments, Social Science, and Politics
[This post was written by PTJ]One of the slightly disconcerting experiences from my week in Vienna teaching an intensive philosophy of science course for the European Consortium on Political Research involved coming out of the bubble of dialogues with Wittgenstein, Popper, Searle, Weber, etc. into the unfortunate everyday actuality of contemporary social-scientific practices of inquiry. In the philosophical literature, an appreciably and...
Even Uncle Ho’s Hand-Weights Contributed to the Revolution (1)
Our social science faculty association organized a trip to Vietnam last week. It was pretty fascinating. It was my first trip, and I don’t speak the language, so obviously I am qualified to generalize wildly about it now. As Gabriel Almond once quipped, ‘you should never generalize about a country until you’ve at least flown over it. So guess I meet that test at least. Here are some anecdotal, political science-y impressions:1. Communist...