by Alana Tiemessen | 12 Oct 2011 | Featured
Nothing risks inviting cynicism and despair like teaching and learning about failed states. For the second year I'm teaching an upper level International Relations course titled "Weak and Failed States" in the Poli Sci Department at UMass Amherst. Much to the confusion of my students, I introduce the course by explaining that "weak and failed states" is a highly contested concept, driven more by policy agendas than empirical consistencies, and...
by Charli Carpenter | 12 Oct 2011 |
One of the few items recently that has caused me to emerge from my nothing-but-Friday-nerd-blogging temporary hiatus was this article on civilian war deaths by Michael Spagat and his collaborators. I wrote a post with some praise and some questions, and recently received a thoughtful response by email from Michael and his crew in which they further detail the coding methods used in the project. Since the original thread generated some interest,...
by Vikash Yadav | 11 Oct 2011 | Featured
And now for something completely different... Feminist Ryan Gosling...
by Steve Saideman | 11 Oct 2011 |
Colonel Gian Gentle, a confirmed counterinsurgency [COIN] skeptic, raises questions for Col. Paul Yingling about the role of generals as COIN seems to be falling short in Afghanistan. Yingling made much noise in 2007 by attacking American generals for poor leadership in 2007, as the US was losing in Iraq at the time. Gentle is essentially pushing Yingling either to call Petraeus a bad general now (since Afghanistan is not such a happy place)...
by Jon Western | 10 Oct 2011 |
Long-time Bosnia watchers Vlado Azinovic, Kurt Bassuener, and Bodo Weber from the Democrtization Policy Council in Sarajevo issue a warning to the EU and NATO to restore a deterrence capability in the country:The deterioration of the prevailing political dynamic is not only continuing, but accelerating one year after the general elections of October 2010. The mix of variables makes political miscalculation all the more likely. The costs of such...
by Patrick Thaddeus Jackson | 10 Oct 2011 | Featured
I remember well the first time I ever encountered the concept of "fair trade": it was on a poster in the cafeteria of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Bonn, where I spent time during the summer of 2002 doing research in the "Archives of Social Democracy" for my first book. The poster proudly proclaimed that the coffee served in the cafeteria was fair trade coffee, and explained the basic principle -- growers were paid a decent wage for their...
by Charli Carpenter | 7 Oct 2011 |
My daughter loves the Game of Thrones story as told to her orally by my brother on a boat in Bali this summer. Yet she remains curiously unwilling to read the books or watch the HBO version with me. Apparently she might find it too hard on her stomach - puzzling, given her affinity for the eminently stomachable Hunger Games trilogy... perhaps to capture the teen sci-fi market George R. R. Martin should consider a final installment:
by Patrick Porter | 7 Oct 2011 | Featured
A few of us in the Politics/IR Department at Reading were asked to summarise the major results and effects of the war in Afghanistan for its tenth anniversary today. I should have talked more about the overall economic crisis that the war on terror has accelerated, but anyway:Today is the 10th anniversary of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan. But it is not the anniversary of the start of the war between the United States, the Al Qaeda network,...
In an effort to change the conversation from the Duck's current all-Jobs all the time format, let me simply commend Jorge Cham, the creator of Ph.D. Comics, and the rest of his crew for the Ph.D. Comics movie, which manages to be everything that a satisfying break from writing code should be: Funny, heartwarming, and short. Graduate students, see it soon. Faculty members can see it too, but not at the same screening as your grad students; after...
by Brian Rathbun | 7 Oct 2011 |
This is a really, really pretty chair. It was designed by Adolf Loos, a turn-of-the-century architect and interior designer. There is a famous building in Vienna once known as the "house with no eyebrows" that is also his. Did you know that? Probably not. Only aficionados of fin-de-siecle modernism really pay much attention. Very few designers are remembered. The same will be true of Steve Jobs in fifty years, maybe twenty. What?! Too...
Steve Jobs occupied a unique place in American business and culture; no other billionaire in my life has commanded genuine affection from the general public, and nobody deserved it more. The Financial Times reports that Jobs's passing has elicited similar responses in P.R. China. One Chinese academic wrote of Jobs:It is said Chinese people hate the rich. But all the Chinese are mourning for Jobs after he died. They don’t hate the rich. They...
by Patrick Thaddeus Jackson | 6 Oct 2011 | Featured
Forget protest movements and populist politics, to say nothing of academic blogging and scholarship -- if you want to change the world in your lifetime, this is the guy you ought to emulate. RIP Steve Jobs, one of the greatest practical visionaries of our time. PS note that Jobs' inspiration for the typography on the Mac was a college course ... a perfect testimony to the indirect but important influence that we academics can have on the world....