(Written with Alister Miskimmon) Following the death of Osama bin Laden, political pressure is mounting for an early scaling down of British military troops presence in Afghanistan ahead of David Cameron’s deadline of 2014 for the end of Britain’s combat mission. With this in mind the British defence establishment is trying to understand their role in Afghanistan since 2001. Much of this soul-searching has focused on trying to explain why...
Blogger has finally started to restore posts, but it doesn't look like everything is back yet. Meanwhile, my partner's off to Kazakhstan, I've got 38 seminar papers and 16 short essays to grade, and my daughter's become obsessed with Naruto. So, in lieu of posting anything substantive:Rob Farley has some thoughts on the air campaign in Libya;PM's thoughts on qualitative and quantitative methods deserves more commentary from our academic...
The folks at The Monkey Cage win blogger of the year. Well done!
Daniel Drezner takes another stab at the Brooks-Krugman-Winecoff-Drezner-Farrell dustup. I merely wish to make a few points:Most voters are information specialists; they do not tend to specialize in the intricacies of policy debates. Thus, they are unlikely to know, for example, the actual distributional implications of the Bush-era tax cuts or understand the details of Iraq.Many of the more engaged voters are partisans; they process...
With the politics of "budget crisis" dominating the political discourse, what does a Tea Party-dominated Republican foreign and defense policy look like? Not good. Gutting diplomacy and development and leaving defense spending largely uncut means American power becomes more blunt and unwieldy. I've written up my take in the current issue of Current Intelligence. Here's a portion: Republican Congressional leaders have pledged that nothing is off...
Qualitative scholars in political science are used to thinking of themselves as under threat from quantitative researchers. Yet qualitative scholars' responses to quantitative "imperialism" suggest that they misunderstand the nature of that threat. The increasing flow of data, the growing availability of computing power and easy-to-use software, and the relative ease of training new quantitative researchers make the position of qualitative...
A running theme around the office lately has been the deeply problematic character of causal mechanisms that international-relations scholars take for granted. For example, apparently simple claims about domestic institutions and credible commitments often require all sorts of heroic assumptions about public attention to policy processes, the degree of actual restraint institutions impose upon executives, and so on. They also have almost...
Stacie Goddard and Tom Burke from Wellesley created this "typical meeting between a student and faculty member at the Political Science Department of Wellesley College" for their annual Political Science majors' dinner. Well done.
At the risk of beating a dead terrorist horse, I want to cite W. Hays Parks (former Special Advisor to the Office of Legal Counsel on Law of War Issues at DoD, JAG and possible stand in for Clint Eastwood in that Grand Torino movie) on the Osama bin Laden assassination/murder/killing debate that has kind of been driving me nuts. In a response letter in the Washington Post, Parks writes: The May 2 lead story by Scott Wilson and Craig Whitlock on...
This is a guest post by Leslie Vinjamuri and Jack Snyder. Leslie is Co-Director of the Centre for the International Politics of Conflict, Rights and Justice and a Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She is also the co-chair of the London Transitional Justice Network. Jack is the Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Relations at...
Someone recently asked me whether, in the wake of the Richard Goldstone's qualifications of his infamous report, the UN was losing its credibility to issue fact-finding studies on humanitarian law violations. In my view, no matter how "credibly" a study is conducted, it is vulnerable to such critiques under the existing system - in which all humanitarian law reporting is partial, ad hoc and selective. That's because unlike other international...
Strategist Edward Luttwak once observed that strategy has a paradoxical logic. The best way forward may be the longest way round, offence can be the best defence, and a seemingly victorious course pursued indefinitely will lead to over-reach. This is produced by the limitations of human strength, the resistance and friction of conflict, and the sheer dynamism and chaos of war.This dynamic surfaces in the insurgency in Afghanistan and the...