I confess that I am a World Bank junkie. There is nothing (well, very little) that perks my intellectual interest more than an in-depth discussion on the internal and external politics of the Bank. Over the past two weeks in DC, I have mercilessly subjected my graduate students to numerous conversations about the challenges facing the organization with experts within the Bank, US Senate, and the world of NGOs and think tanks. To my fabulous...
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Laws of the Jungle
While rereading Kipling's 1894 classic The Jungle Book, I began to think about the curious ways in which the author constructed the relations between communities of animals in the jungle. Here are a few observations:1. The jungle is neither anarchic nor Darwinian in Kipling's narrative. It is in fact best understood as an interspecies society governed by a set of laws. To this extent, it seems to mirror the international society tradition. In...
Is there a time and place for (humanitarian) shock and awe?
Don't feel bad though. It's disempowering.Look. I get the whole ‘stop the portrayal of Africans as victims’ debate. I really do. Empowerment and portrays of empowerment are important. But I can’t help but be slightly frustrated with this entry at UN Dispatch which discusses the “shock and awe” approach to fundraising for disasters.Penelope Chester (apparently a professional Canadian humanitarian) quotes Peter Gill (who has written on the...
War Powers, My Ass…
The House of Representatives recently just voted on a bill that would require the U.S. to remove its forces from Libya on the basis of the War Powers Act, arguing that the President had not received the Congressional go-ahead to keep the military in hostilities past a certain time threshhold. It earned the votes of 148 Congressmen of 435, 87 Republicans and 61 Democrats. The media presented it as demonstrating the muscles of the Tea Party...
Hugh Grant the Unlikely Victor in the News of the World Battle
The highlights of this story are largely well known: At a pub in Dover Hugh Grant secretly records former News of the World (NoW) reporter Paul McMullan detailing how NoW had regularly hacked into phones and raided the trash of celebrities to get the inside scoop. A feature is printed in the New Statesman. Further allegations come to the fore- including that the phone of former missing youth Milly Dowler, as well as the phones of deceased...
Friday Nerd Blogging
minor spoiler alert Besides some time on the paintball field, one thing my son and I did this week before my trip with his sister was watch the latest installment in one of our favorite sci-fi series. What it lacks in character development and plot, Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon certainly makes up for with some of the most intense techno-masculine violence ever to land in a PG-13 film. But what struck both of us ("Mom, why haven't her heels...
Stereotypes and suspicion: Nicer words won’t change anything
A new report was released yesterday, ‘Suspect Communities’, comparing how UK media and government have framed Irish and Muslim communities since the 1970s. The authors find that the ideas underpinning counter-terrorism measures and the way politicians, policymakers and the media discuss who might be responsible for bombings have not changed over four decades. The key finding is that ambiguity surrounding who is an ‘extremist’ or a ‘terrorist’...
Israel in Washington
Last week I had the great pleasure of visiting Boston and Washington DC.During this academic junket research-related visit, sparkling conversation was had with some of the liveliest minds on foreign policy in the US, including the established heavy-hitters Andrew Bacevich and Edward Luttwak, as well as some of the sharpest younger thinkers around including the hawkish idealist and internationalist David Adesnik, the sardonically skeptical Dan...
What Should I Read While I’m in Indonesia?
Sorry for going AWOL for a couple of weeks - my lame excuse despite fascinating things happening in all my usual areas is the craziness of preparing for both a move and international travel with a teenager. Paradoxically, as of Saturday the situation reverses: I'll be on vacation abroad meaning both more time to blog and possibly less inclination. If I do pop in after this week, it will most likely be with book reviews of what I'm reading on...
Dan-Nexon-Gets-Taken-to-the-Woodshed Alert
In honor of Brad DeLong's "smackdown" posts, I hereby inaugurate an occasional chronicle of public embarrassment by pointing to Andreas Osiander's (correct) indictment of errors of typography, historical sequence, and fact in The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe. I find this particularly cringeworthy because:I discovered a number of the typographical and, for lack of a better term, proper-name-construction errors right after the book...
Battlefield Normatica
Last week's vote for gay marriage in New York state was a signal win for U.S. advocates. Two weeks earlier, in a move hailed by gay groups and the Obama administration, the UN Human Rights Council voted 23-19 to commission a study on “discriminatory laws and practices and acts of violence against individuals based on their sexual orientation and gender identity.” Do these and other recent advances for gay advocates demonstrate that a new...
Yes, Steve, Kyrgyzstan is Important
Is it crazy to think that "the situation in Kyrgyzstan has a critical bearing on US national security?" Steve Walt thinks so:The first sentence of the announcement informed me that "the situation in Kyrgyzstan has a critical bearing on American national security." As my teen-aged daughter would say: "OMG!" Did you know that your safety and security depends on the political situation in.... Kyrgyztan?" Yes, I know that the air base at Manas is a...