by Brian Rathbun | 7 Apr 2011 |
So I spend a few years writing a book on American foreign policy and stop paying attention to European politics, only to return and find the whole thing in chaos. I am finding three developments going on in Europe fascinating (if despicable and disgusting).First, the Financial Times recently ran a story on Sarokozy's plan to launch a debate in France on the importance of secularism, which is really just a way to pick on Muslims and draw votes...
by Dan Nexon | 6 Apr 2011 |
Alex Cooley and I have just published an article at Foreign Affairs Online on Bahrain and the politics of the US overseas basing network. An excerpt:U.S. policymakers have long struggled to reconcile their support for friendly authoritarian regimes with their preference for political liberalization abroad. The ongoing upheavals in the Middle East, like so many developments before them, shine a bright light on this inconsistency. In Egypt, the...
by Steve Saideman | 6 Apr 2011 |
I have already posted at the Duck and also at my blog on the spat between Tom Ricks and Peter Feaver. Today, Feaver responded to Ricks. I don't want to get into the he said/he said debate. I just want to raise one point and then develop it a bit:Feaver is not really doing social science here. He is seeking to explain why a particular decision happened, but he is missing a huge opportunity to develop a general understanding of Presidential...
by Laura Sjoberg | 5 Apr 2011 |
Part 3 (of 3) ...In concluding, Elshtain characterizes my essay as “overreach,” “hyper-theorizing,” and “prosaic,” arguing that (like “the entire post-structural arsenal”), “when you get down to the nitty-gritty, things slip through your fingers.”Its true that my essay discusses more than it could ever back up – because the essay is not a research essay or an original work, so much as it is an accounting for, and asking for recognition for,...
by Charli Carpenter | 5 Apr 2011 |
We also talk about Libya, R2P, Wikileaks, gender, and why Dan should give critical theory a second chance despite how they left things. I do feel compelled to explain the weirdness around 21:20. We had a tech fail (I blame the Cylons) and fixing it disrupted my original plan to cite my co-blogger Vikash Yadav on some very important insights in this post. So I asked Sang Ngo at BHTV to splice in a clip I recorded afterwards, making the...
by Charli Carpenter | 4 Apr 2011 |
Eric Posner had a recent piece in The National Interest on the concept of "lawfare," in which he appears to define "lawfare" as efforts to undermine powerful states' foreign policy goals by holding them accountable to international norms (he lumps Wikileaks and Human Rights Watch together as two such entities), then to say that NGO activity in this area isn't really "lawfare," (well duh) and then goes on to say (conflating NGO activity with...
by Laura Sjoberg | 3 Apr 2011 |
Elshtain, before characterizing my article as a “massive shopping list” of “feminists argue,” “feminists claim,” etc. (i.e., as the critical literature review that it is and she forgot to do before writing her initial article), “engages” my questions about her approach to each of Waltz’s three images, and her finding that gender would not change how we think of any of them.Though she characterizes my work as failing “to grapple in a...
by Brian Rathbun | 2 Apr 2011 |
So President Obama has his own doctrine now, because Wolf Blitzer tells us so. It is basically what Ross Douhat of the New York Times called the “liberal way of war” in a column on March 20. Libya is the “beau ideal of a liberal internationalist intervention” – humanitarian, multilateral and limited. This is the same columnist who just six weeks before called claimed that the President’s “foreign policy has owed far more to conservative...
by Brian Rathbun | 2 Apr 2011 |
So this is my first foray into this brave new world of blogging, at the invitation of Charli and others at the Duck of Minerva. I think my main credential is having called Dan Drezner something profane at a workshop in Montreal, which is to say, my outspoken personality. What I exactly said to him said escapes me, but I suppose that same limited memory speaks for my potential as a blogger as well. For the record, I do not even own a cell phone...
by Dan Nexon | 2 Apr 2011 |
If I read him correctly, Armed Liberal thinks that I advanced an argument for intervening in Libya and that this makes some people who opposed the Iraq War a bunch of hypocrites.Or that my description of Obama's justifications are accurate and that those justifications don't sufficiently distinguish Libya from Iraq.I'm not entirely sure. Probably because I'm still kind of sick and I'm very tired. Regardless, AL raises some key issues after...
by Dan Nexon | 1 Apr 2011 |
A large and growing problem, apparently. Via Jim MacDonald, who brings greater publicity to the plight of S.K.S. Perry, a self-published author who discovers that his book is already being sold by someone else on Amazon... and finds that Amazon doesn't seem to give a damn.Many of our readers our academics who, I assume, have discovered -- or will soon discover if they use the right search terms -- that their own books are available in the form...
by Dan Nexon | 1 Apr 2011 |
We're very excited that Steve Saideman and Brian Rathbun have agreed to join the Duck as guest bloggers - the first of a few new voices that may be trickling into the guest blogging pool over the next few months. You may already know Steve him from his blog--Steve Saideman's Semi-Spew--or from his extensive publication record. His first post, on, the Tom Rick's criticisms of Peter Faever's recent International Security article, appeared earlier...