Dave Noon Erik Loomis relates two anecdotes about the workings of US power. Both are a bit extreme. The US-Haiti relationship, in particular, is about as unequal as you can get in contemporary world politics. Still, Loomis' stories illustrate why some of us leave short-term stints in government with the impression that Washington is both much more powerful and much weaker than US academics often assume.US officials find themselves significantly...
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Against Esoteric Readings of Neoconservatvism, or Always Check the Footnotes
I'm currently working on a few difference pieces that deal with the relationship between liberalism and empire. I also, as long-team readers of the Duck know, consider neoconservative understandings of international politics as a variant of liberalism that constitutes a specific flavor of the US commitment to democratic enlargement as transformative of international politics. Neoconservatives reject the idea that international institutions, at...
The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission: an outlier in the international transitional justice industry
Did you know Canada has a truth and reconciliation commission operating right now? It seems neither do most Canadians. The Canadian TRC was initiated to address the history and legacies of the former residential school system for Canada’s indigenous population, or First Nations. First Nations children were taken from their homes- siblings often separated- and placed into residential schools, which operated from 1870 until 1993. These children...
Ned is dead, baby. Ned is dead.
So I have finally caught up on all the back episodes of Game of Thrones, so I know what the hell you are all talking about. I thought I'd take up Charli's challenge about the paradigm that Dead Ned represents because I think that it says something deeper (always deeper) about something missing in IR theory these days.Ned represents duty, honor and integrity as opposed to old school Machiavellianism (although I guess duty, honor and integrity...
Beware the Blog?
Being new to the blogging world, I have been thinking a lot about the utility and influence of blogs. Blogs seem appealing in so many ways. They appear to be an effective means of disseminating facts and views quickly to a wide audience, facilitating timely responses to emerging policy issues (and other fun pop politics). At the same time, blogging is a way of discussing real intellectual ideas free of many of the pitfalls of peer review and...
Criminalizing Medical Aid
The crackdown in Bahrain hasn't received as much attention as those elsewhere in the Arab world. In part, that's because what's happening in Syria and Libya are more spectacular. In part that's because Bahrain doesn't have many enemies among western regimes. Still, the regime smashed down an iron fist, one that hit the Shia community particularly hard. Although the government has officially lifted marital law, it continues to stifle political...
International Studies Association-Northeast Conference: One Week Left
Proposal for the conference are due 20 June 2011. Details here.
Friday Nerd Blogging
And so on.* H/T WinterisComingBitch. Scott Meslow ponders the human security implications of Ned's choices. *Oh, the pedagogical possibilities! Does Ned Stark represent constructivism? Or does he represent the mocking realist riposte to constructivists as naive fools? Or only a mockery of that riposte? (For readers not yet following Game of Thrones on HBO, this. For viewers who wish more depth on the Starks, this. To those viewers who've also...
Write less. Read more.
I thought I would offer my take on the series of posts below on how to reform the peer-review system. Part of the problem is bad reviews. We can remove the anonymity of them, but that raises the obvious problems (bad blood, retaliation, pulling punches, speaking truth to power, etc). A better solution would be to rely on the expertise of editors. A really stupid review is obvious to even non-experts. And if one reviewer says X and the other...
Visualizing the Correlates of Global Issue Creation
My big work-related task this month is to pull together my focus group findings into something approximating a theoretically relevant conference paper. I like to start with visualizations.This chart is derived from a code scheme we developed to categorize human security practitioners' responses in focus groups to the question: what factors facilitate or inhibit the emergence of new issues on global policy agenda? Answers fell into five broad...
Targeting Targeted Killing
I was asked to step-in at the last minute to write a chapter on targeted killing for a textbook on isses in the War on Terror. Given the recent OBL killing and debate about raids, etc, I was surprisingly excited at the prospect of engaging with the issue. Although my chapter is almost done (no really, Richard, it’s on its way!) I’ve noticed some problems with researching the topic and trying to draw general conclusions as to whether or not it...
Feminist IR 101, Post #10, Feminist Scholarly Community
One of my favorite characterization of feminist theorizing is in Sarah Brown's 1988 Millennium article, where she calls feminist work "fundamentally a political act of commitment to understanding the world from a perspective of the socially subjugated" (p.472). From this and other reading in feminist theory and praxis, I've always seen feminism as not just an intellectual interest in gender as a force in global politics, but also as a politics...