Today is a good day to mark the passing of a true injustice.
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Be Concerned but not Informed: Radical Islamic Terrorism and Mainstream Media since 9/11
The website e-IR asked me to review how mainstream media have represented radical Islamist media in the past decade, and what this means for the spread of radical discourses more broadly. Here is my reply, and you can read the original at e-IR here. Mainstream media’s presentation of radical Islamic terrorism since 11 September 2001 is simply a continuation of how mainstream media have represented political violence for many decades. Moral...
Stuff Political Scientists Like #9 — Being Liked, or Citations
Political scientists love citations, or, more accurately, to be cited. Actually compiling citations is a tremendously tedious chore that political scientists leave to the very end of any paper, one marked by a bitter struggle with Endnote. Citations are the best marker political scientists have of success. As political scientists come in both male and female varieties, they cannot simply measure penises. And even if all political scientists...
Mortenson declines Education Grawemeyer
In addition to filling an open faculty line in international relations (IR), I was hired in 1991 by the University of Louisville with the idea that I would eventually direct the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. The World Order award was then one of four Grawemeyer Awards and at the time I was hired, I knew virtually nothing about any of them. The prize was worth $150,000, making it the largest award in Political Science....
Luck and a Fair “International Talk Like a Pirate Day” To You!
Not to make light of ongoing troubles in the Horn of Africa and beyond, but... well.If you want to go beyond the five A's, click here.
R2Paternalism
The banner image of the ICRtoP (International Coalition for the Responsibility to Protect) website features a photo of seven boys under the protective gaze of a UN peacekeeper as he carries his bottled water, while other soldiers patrol ahead on the pathway that they all share together. From a structural perspective, the image is compelling because it situates the viewer as the rear-guard of the mission.Unfortunately, there is absolutely no...
Learn to Love Lawfare
Photo courtesy of Etsy. The perfect lawfare key chain!Over at the Lawfare blog, Jack Goldsmith recently offered up a "mea culpa" on his changing views of the concept and practice of lawfare. I don't want to address the specifics of that post, but this and the Libya situation got me thinking again that a non-pejorative conceptualization of lawfare needs to be put forward. Particularly in the context of the International Criminal Court. Stay...
On Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and the Construction of a Liberal International Order
Debate over NATO's military intervention in the Libyan civil war has reinvigorated discussion among observers of international relations on the merits (or demerits) of the United Nations's Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine. You can find links to important entries in the current debate at the end of this post, but I'm going to react here to one part of it. In a rejoinder to her critics, including IR student and Slouching Towards Columbia...
Conflict prevention and early warnings: closing the gap through communications?
The catastrophes of Rwanda and Bosnia led to a debate in the 1990s about the warning-response gap. Conflict prevention and early warning systems did not seem up to scratch. Third parties intervened too late, if at all. Spending was skewed towards mitigating the effects of conflicts, not on stopping them happen in the first place. The spread of satellite television brought conflicts into more immediate public vision. It was feared this created a...
Friday Nerd Blogging
Now that Blood and Chrome appears to be at risk of demotion from upcoming TV show to series of webisodes (!) BSG fans among the readership can at least geek out on this documentary. (Because most of us have so little better to do with the start of the term and all.)
Post-revolution Walk of Shame in Libya: women asked to ‘go home’ in the afterglow of the revolution
The exciting and tumultuous eve of the revolution in Libya has achieved many of its objectives: the power balance has swung in the rebel's favor, many national governments around the world now recognize the Transitional National Council (TNC) as the legitimate leadership, and most (though not all) of the country is under their control.In many ways, this week can be described as 'the morning after' the revolution in Libya. Rebels drunk on gun...
New Statistics on Civilian Targeting
In a new paper, Michael Spagat and a number of collaborators explore the determinants of intentional civilian killing in war. Using sophisticated regression analysis they claim to have found "four significant behavioral patterns":"First, the majority (61%) of all formally organized actors in armed conflict during 2002-2007 refrained from killing civilians in deliberate, direct targeting.Second, actors were more likely to have carried out some...