by Patrick Thaddeus Jackson | 20 Mar 2011 | Featured
I was fortunate enough to participate in an ISA panel yesterday morning entitled "The Third Generation of Constructivist Thought: Boundaries, Distinctions, Limits -- Social Theory, Philosophy, and Constructivism," organized by Benjamin Herborth and Oliver Kessler. I decided to take the opportunity to deliver a little sermon on the counterproductive enterprise of trying to sharply define "constructivism" as a single coherent theory of anything,...
by Rodger Payne | 19 Mar 2011 |
On CNN this Saturday morning, the day after the United Nations Security Council voted for Resolution 1973 (2011) to authorize a "no-fly zone" in Libya, the debate has centered around whether or not the United States and its allies want regime change in Libya. After all, a few days ago President Obama said "It's time for Qaddafi to go." Similarly, British Prime Minister David Cameron has declared: "It is almost impossible to envisage a future...
by Vikash Yadav | 19 Mar 2011 | Featured
With the UNSC approval of the NFZ+ and the announcement of a cease-fire by the Libyan government, a slaughter in eastern Libya may have been averted. I don't want to weigh in on the NFZ+ as other Ducks are much more qualified to discuss the potential strategic and diplomatic challenges ahead. I did however want to flag a few scattered items about the rebels themselves and purported links with foreign patrons which some readers may have missed...
by Rodger Payne | 17 Mar 2011 |
I've been looking at some of the documents in "The Reykjavik File" at the National Security Archive. This coming October will mark 25 years since Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev almost completed a startling nuclear disarmament deal. Had they been successful, both superpowers would have been disarmed 15 years ago!The US proposal at Reykjavik was fairly startling, as reported in the Memorandum of Conversation, Reagan-Gorbachev, Final Meeting,...
by Rodger Payne | 16 Mar 2011 |
In February, Bill Clinton's second Secretary of Defense, William Perry, spoke at Harvard's Belfer Center and continued his ongoing campaign against nuclear weapons. With former Secretaries of State George Shultz and Henry Kissinger and former Senator Sam Nunn, Perry has for many years been seeking a "world free of nuclear weapons." After describing his personal experience working behind the scenes during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Perry...
by Rodger Payne | 15 Mar 2011 |
Most of the members of the Duck are at the ISA conference in Montreal this week.Meanwhile, Japan is trying to deal with a horrific series of nuclear accidents, triggered by natural disaster -- the 9.0 earthquake and resultant tsunami. I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on nuclear engineering or physics. However, I can recommend some writing by specialists who are closely following the situation and describing the events in understandable...
by Patrick Thaddeus Jackson | 14 Mar 2011 | Featured
About a month ago, the symposium on my book over at The Disorder of Things that I mentioned in an earlier post reached a critical stage: posts by Paul, Joe, Nick, and Meera were up, and it was now my turn. And then life intervened, and lo and behold it's been almost a month and I haven't put up a reply. I finally got a chance to start work on a reply this weekend, but it's grown so large in conception that I am going to have to split it into...
by Dan Nexon | 13 Mar 2011 |
Four days ago I suggested that time is running out in Libya. With news that Brega has now fallen to pro-Gaddafi forces, it seems more likely than not that the end is nigh for the rebels. And yet France and the UK are still trying to build support for a no-fly zone, now with a major assist by the Arab League. The problem: a no-fly zone isn't going to save the rebellion. An air campaign against Libyan forces, combined with indirect assistance to...
by Charli Carpenter | 10 Mar 2011 |
I was fascinated to learn while working on my Battlestar Galactica "research project" that Adama's quote from the scene above was floating around the Internet for some time during the Egyptian Revolution. The statement "This quote now applicable to Egypt" appeared in a Reddit thread, was reposted on at least one Facebook site, quickly attracting 6,000 likes and over 1800 comments, while like-minded tweets exploded across cyberspace. This one...
by Laura Sjoberg | 10 Mar 2011 |
(after a long hiatus, which you don't even want to know about) When we last visited "Feminist IR 101," we were talking about the ways that gendered lenses reformulate the way(s) we think about what security is and how it is practiced (empirically and normatively) in the global political arena - and I promised to put gendered lenses to work to talk about a "real world" security problem - what Feminist Security Studies might look like in...
by Dan Nexon | 9 Mar 2011 |
If recent reports are correct, NATO is running out of time if it wants to use a no-fly zone to tilt the balance in favor of the rebels. The Russians and Chinese may eventually agree to a United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolution authorizing a no-fly zone, but efforts to secure their agreement will take time. And it is not at all clear that a no-fly zone will prove sufficient to overcome Gaddafi's better-trained and equipped forces.Thus,...
by Dan Nexon | 9 Mar 2011 |
Steve Saideman has some good advice and useful resources for those unfamiliar with Montreal.