I will be a attending a workshop at Cornell University on bombing norms for the next few days. (Presumably after I get back, I'll never again bomb anything I'm not supposed to.) On this note, readers may be interested to have a look at this new memorandum Stephanie mentioned from Human Rights Watch on incendiary weapons, which follows up on an earlier report by HRW's Arms Division. The campaign I've been tracking for the paper I'm presenting is...
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How fares “lawfare”?
There has been so much going on with the international law front, it’s kind of hard to know where to begin. In sum:The Obama administration has decided to put Khalid Shiek Mohammed on trial at Guantanamo rather than New York City.The Obama administration has released a legal opinion on the Authorization Use of Military Force in Libya. The ICRC is concerned over unexploded ordinance in Libya (UXO).The ICRC will be releasing it’s update to the...
Why We Fight?
Steve Walt asks an interesting question: Is America addicted to war? He gives five reasons why we find ourselves in constant war: 1. Because we can2. Because we have no serious enemies3. The all volunteer force4. It's the establishment stupid5. Congress has checked outThe first three and the last point all speak to the limited international and domestic structural constraints the United States faces on the use of force. The fourth speaks to the...
What the hell is going on in Europe?
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...
Bahrain’s Base Politics
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...
Social Science and Bush Policy Towards Iraq
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...
A Reply to the Reply: Jean Elshtain, Gender, and IR (Part III)
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,...
Dan Drezner Denies Being a Cylon, Professes Love for Mainstream IR
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...
Posner, Dunlap and Lawfare
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...
A Reply to the Reply: Jean Elshtain, Gender, and IR (Part II)
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...
A Different Take on the “Obama Doctrine”: Is Obama still a realist?
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...
Why it sucks to study political psychology in international relations
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...