U.S. Senator Tom Coburn has released a new report criticizing the National Science Foundation, in no small part because he is offended that the NSF funds political science.This new, lengthy-for-Congress report is a slick and well-produced piece of agit-prop. In it, Coburn claims to have found billions (!) in mismanagement at the NSF, including plenty of made-for-journalists "scandals" like jello wrestling at the McMurdo Research Station in...
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Mladic, OBL and International Justice
It's hard to overstate the significance of Ratko Mladic's arrest last night. Moreso that Slobodon Milsoevic, Serbia's president during the 1991-1995 war of ex-Yugoslavia, and moreso that Radovan Karadzic the political leader of the Bosnian Serbs during the war, Mladic is reviled by Bosnian survivors of the conflict as the former leader of the Bosnian Serb Army. Though best known for his his calculated role in the war's most infamous massacre of...
Standing Up against the “Patriot Act”
It’s great to see a few of our elected representatives fighting back against the Democratic and Republican leadership’s attempt to renew the Patriot Act for another four years without amendment or even debate. I highly recommend reading a few of the statements and speeches by the handful of Congress people brave enough to stand up against the leadership of both parties. Here is one of Republican Senator Rand Paul’s speeches from a few days...
Must Men Be Pigs? The C*jones Conundrum
Last week was full of bad news for those of us with c*jones: One of my co-genders, who just happened to run the IMF, caught redhanded (or something) after assaulting a chambermaid; another, the very model of a manny-man rather than a girlie-man, fessing up to having sired a child with an employee over a decade ago. This week a one-time Presidential front-runner facing indictment for using campaign money to cover up news about his own...
Cutting Edge Research on Popular Views of War Law
My Rules of War class this past Spring was an Honors version of the course, and to challenge my students I asked them to do original research on popular conceptions of international humanitarian law, an issue the International Committee of the Red Cross takes quite seriously. The assignment was to identify a concept in the rules of war, gain a firm understanding of the law, then identify a set of data on how people see those rules, and use...
The IMF Horse Race
The Western powers are in a rush to quickly confirm Christine Lagarde as the next MD, but there are some very good alternative choices outside of Europe who should be carefully considered. It may also be in the interest of the institution to at least appear more inclusive to the non-European parts of the world. Here is a very rushed list of candidates whom I think would be viable in the eyes of the major stakeholders at the Fund (although each...
Do the ‘Securitweebs’ matter?: Between Facts and Snark
Brian C. Rathbun now has 64 twitter followers!Co-authored by Stephanie Carvin and Ben O'LoughlinThis article is about the twitter community who post content about human security or security in a non–traditional context – not just tanks and strategy but natural disaster relief, post-conflict reconstruction, low level political violence, and all the law and politics surrounding these issues.So far as we can tell, this community seems to share the...
Best 22 May 2011 Headline?
Kicking the Can Down the Ring Road
How is it that time and time again we are persuaded to hang on for another year in Afghanistan with the mantra that counterinsurgency (a.k.a. COIN) will really work this time. While I certainly acknowledge the limited range of alternative options and oppose any peace agreement with the Taliban, I think that putting our faith in COIN time and time again is problematic... To understand why, perhaps a (not so brief) recap of how the discourse of...
Obama’s “1967” Play
What to make of it? Was it significant, or just more of the same? Of course it was significant -- it is the first time a U.S. president has publicly claimed the "1967 lines" as the basis for negotiations and it came after an apparent "angry" phone call from Netanyahu to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton demanding that the language be removed from the speech. It was clearly meant to send a signal. For the past five months, the Obama...
Harold Koh at Opinio Juris: “Killing OBL was Legal.”
Like Robert Haddick, though for different reasons, I was glad to see a State Department spokesperson publicly issue the legal justification for the manner in which the OBL raid was carried out.* Also as a blogger, I was delighted to see the explanation take the form of a much-trumpeted guest post at Opinio Juris. Slightly disappointed, however, at the content of the post, posted earlier today. To begin with, Harold Koh focuses solely on jus in...
The Door is Over There
I took part in a panel on Peacebuilding yesterday at the Center for International Governance Innovation [CIGI], which was part of the larger Canadian Political Science Association annual meeting. My panel was on Afghanistan, and it was most striking how most of the folks were already using the word "failure" to describe the mission. I was uncomfortable with that, not because I am a wild-eyed optimist about the international effort to help...