So here's a question: How do we evaluate whether or not a humanitarian intervention is successful? The obvious difficulty is that the intervention alters history and we are left with running various counterfactual thought experiments. Here's the Obama administration's take on what would have happened in the absence of intervention. According to Laura Rozen, Dennis Ross and Derek Chollet told reporters that:“We were looking at ‘Srebrenica on...
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We’re Sorry
We're sorry...That some of our soldiers publicly refer to your people in derogatory and racist language.That some of our soldiers shoot your unarmed civilians at random, defile their corpses, and cut off body parts to keep as trophies.That some of our soldiers killed the cousin of your head of state. We didn't even know we were in the hometown of the President, how could we have known he was a Karzai? Oh, right.. we're very sorry.That our...
Tenure for Teachers
The official justification for tenure is that it allows scholars to "speak truth to power" without fear of losing their jobs. There's obviously something to that, but I've always looked upon tenure as a form of non-salary compensation. Most college professors make less than they would in other sectors. Tenure compensates us with much greater job security. I'd never thought about it in these terms, but the same reasoning might also apply to...
Global Governance and the Worst Case Scenario: Theorizing the International Relations of a Zombie Holocaust
ISA 2011 featured a book panel on Daniel Drezner's Theories of International Politics and Zombies. Stephanie Carvin created, animated, moderated, and even presented on the roundtable. Other participants included Robert Farley (of LGM), Jeremy Youde, myself, Charli Carpenter, and, of course, Dan D. Topics included:The results of zombie-apocalypse simulations;The global health regime and flesh-eating ghouls;Post-Zombie IR theory;The laws of war...
“Manning Up” and Making (the Libyan) War
Women are supposed to be those innocent of war, protected by chivalric warriors. The Trojan War was made over Helen. G. W. Bush justified the invasion of Iraq with the platitude that “violence against women is always and everywhere wrong.” Yet Maureen Dowd, in the New York Times Op-Ed Section, notes that the story of the Libyan no-fly zone is one of “a group of strong women swooping down to shake the president out of his delicate sensibilities...
Quacking about an award
Since Dan is entirely too modest to blog this himself, I thought I'd do it myself:International Security Studies Section Best book Award to: Daniel H. Nexon (Georgetown University) for The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009).Yes, that's right: our very own Dan Nexon won the best book award from the International Security Studies section of...
Libya and the Responsibility to Protect
I see there’s some naysaying about the use of force to protect civilians in Libya. Among various refrains is the claim that “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) doctrine lacks moral strength if applied selectively: the international community can’t legitimately go after Qaddafi if it won’t/can’t also go after every other dictator.So just a reminder that the doctrine, as laid out by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty...
Of Lords and Flies
The release of the first three of a reported 4,000 photos and videos from an American "kill team" in Afghanistan threatens to become the next "Abu Ghraib." The horrific images of civilian corpses being photographed with grinning American troops raises important questions about the American military's ability to maintain professional standards and discipline; soldiers' (racialized) understanding of and ability to engage with foreign societies;...
Libya and ‘the shadow of Iraq’
At the beginning of every war, journalists must quickly find a frame that makes the new violence intelligible to their audiences. It is often convenient to compare new events to old events, to see what looks similar and what looks different (journalists routinely follow the principle of comparison earlier articulated by Sesame Street). In 2006, during the aftermath of the 2003 Iraq War, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman employed the...
Libya and Feminist Peace Theory
At the Daily Beast John Avlon gestures quizzically at the presence of women among those influencing the Libyan intervention:The Libyan airstrikes mark the first time in U.S. history that a female-dominated diplomatic team has urged military action. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joined with U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and the influential Office of Multilateral and Human Rights Director Samantha Power to argue for airstrikes against Libya....
Things I Learned at ISA
In descending order of seriousness but not necessarily importance:1) According to a study presented at this workshop by Helen Turton (a whip-smart student at Exeter) the most commonly used methodological approach in the field is not quantitative analysis but rather interpretivism. Also (this from preliminary findings by Daniel Maliniak and Ryan Powers - I look forward to the published version): the most widely cited papers in the discipline of...
Saudi and Emirati Intervention in Bahrain
Saudi APCs and Emirati troops are now on the streets of Bahrain attempting to squelch what was formerly a non-violent, secular, youth-led, economically rooted, democracy movement as America does little other than urge restraint from its allies. Such mealy mouthed statements toward a regime which is using live ammunition against unarmed protesters and then denying the victims of its rampage access to medical facilities indicates that the US...